Keith Ransom

I'm a Post Doctoral Researcher at the University of Adelaide in the School of Psychology where I collaborate with Dr. Rachel Stephens and supervise student research projects. I'm also a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences and member of the Computational Cognitive Science Lab led by Andrew Perfors and Charles Kemp.

My current research projects focus on two related fronts:

social meta-inference: this work seeks to extend theoretical models of human inference to models of communication and influence among individuals and groups, and to models of social consensus. This allows us to understand and predict patterns of bi-directional influence: namely, how people’s perception of the public information environment affects what they learn from information shared with them, and how patterns of inference and information transmission affect the public information environment.

explainable reasoning: Increasingly, public information sharing is heavily mediated through technology, including online social networks architectures and AI. Thus there is a growing need to understand how such mediation impacts human reasoning at scale: for example, how can people correctly calibrate their trust not only in each other, but in the technology, and in the evidence extant in the information environment. This research seeks to develop applied tools that monitor and promote calibrated trust and vigilance towards shared information, using easily comprehensible, yet high fidelity representations and explanations of data and reasoning at scale.

More broadly, my research looks at the challenges of everyday reasoning: how we learn about the world, and generalise from our experiences of it. I'm interested in how we infer and represent the structures and processes that lie beneath the data we do have and how we leverage these representations to reason beyond that data. I use a combination of computational modelling and simulation techniques as well as behavioural experiments to get at these issues in a variety of contexts and at multiple levels (individual, social group, and societal).