Rate My Professor Paul Bays

Professor Paul Bays is the Professor of Computation and Cognition in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge, where he leads the Computational Cognition Group. His research investigates the nature of internal representations that the brain constructs and sustains to interact with the world, and the computations performed on these representations to achieve behavioral goals. Bays employs visual psychophysics and memory tasks, extended reality technology, eye and body movement recordings, mathematical models, artificial neural networks, and computer simulations. He collaborates with researchers utilizing brain imaging, recording, and stimulation methods, as well as neuropsychologists examining cognitive aging, mental illness, and neurological disorders. Key areas include visual working memory—where limits arise from resolution rather than item count, with resources allocated to visual features influencing perception, decisions, and actions—visual attention during eye movements, sensory prediction, and motor learning such as tactile attenuation.

Bays earned a BA Honours in Natural Sciences, specializing in Experimental Psychology, from Downing College, University of Cambridge, in 2000. He completed his PhD in Neurological Studies at the University of London in 2006, supervised by Professor Daniel Wolpert and funded by a Wellcome Prize Studentship. His career trajectory includes Research Fellow and Lab Manager at the UCL Institute of Neurology (2001–2002), Senior Research Fellow in the Cognitive Neurology group at UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (2006–2010), Wellcome-Beit Prize and Research Career Development Fellow at UCL Institute of Neurology (2010–2015), Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences, UC Berkeley (2013–2014), and Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in Basic Biomedical Science at the Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge (2015–2022). Awards include the Rank Prize Funds Committee Prize for best contributed paper, Wellcome-Beit Prize Fellowship (2010), Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellowship (2010), and Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship (2015). Notable publications comprise 'Dynamic shifts of limited working memory resources in human vision' (Science, 2008), 'The precision of visual working memory is set by allocation of a shared resource' (Journal of Vision, 2009), 'Noise in neural populations accounts for errors in working memory' (Journal of Neuroscience, 2014), 'Changing concepts of working memory' (Nature Neuroscience, 2014), and 'Reassessing the evidence for capacity limits in neural signals related to working memory' (Cerebral Cortex, 2018). He serves as Reviewing Editor for eLife.