Rate My Professor Andy Wills

Andy Wills is Professor in Psychology in the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, where he also serves as Associate Dean (Research) for the Faculty of Health. He obtained his B.Sc. in Psychology (2i) from the University of Southampton in 1993 and his Ph.D. in computational learning theory, titled Categorization: From Features to Decisions, from the University of Cambridge in 1998 under Ian McLaren. Following his doctorate, Wills held a Junior Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge from 1998 to 2000. He then joined the University of Exeter, advancing from Lecturer in 2000 to Senior Lecturer in 2005 and Associate Professor in 2006. In 2012, he became Full Professor at the University of Plymouth, a position he continues to hold. Additionally, he served as REF coordinator from 2017 to 2024 and Chair of the Curriculum Review Steering Group from 2016 to 2017. Wills is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (2000) and an elected Fellow of the Psychonomic Society (2010).

Professor Wills' principal research interest lies in the categorization of visual objects, with related investigations into the role of errors and attention in learning, and recent work on human-centred AI at the intersection of artificial intelligence and psychology. He advocates for open science as the maintainer of the catlearn R package, an open repository of learning and categorization models exceeding 43,000 downloads. His key publications include 'Attention and associative learning in humans' (Psychological Bulletin, 2016, with Le Pelley et al.), 'On the adequacy of current empirical evaluations of formal models of categorization' (Psychological Bulletin, 2012, with Pothos), 'Combination or Differentiation?' (Cognitive Psychology, 2015, with Inkster and Milton), 'Dissociable learning processes, associative theory, and testimonial reviews' (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2019, with Edmunds et al.), 'Better generalization through distraction? Concurrent load reduces the size of the inverse base-rate effect' (Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 2025, with Dome), and 'g-Distance: On the Comparison of Model and Human Heterogeneity' (Psychological Review, 2025, with Dome). He received the Psychonomic Society Best Article Award in 2020 and authored a highly cited paper ranked in the top 1% on Web of Science in 2018. Ranked in the top 1% of scientists worldwide in his field, Wills has supervised eight PhD theses from 2004 to 2023 and serves as principal investigator on projects such as 'Biomarkers for AI-assisted diagnosis of autism in adults: A feasibility study' (2025-2026). In teaching, he covers research methods, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience, and is lead author of the Creative Commons materials Research Methods in R.