title: Thomas L. Griffiths: Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology.
abstract: Presents a short biography of one of the winners of the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology (2012). Thomas L. Griffiths won the award for bringing mathematical precision to the deepest questions in human learning, reasoning, and concept formation. In his pioneering work, Thomas L. Griffiths has used probabilistic models and Bayesian learning methods to illuminate an extraordinarily wide range of problems in areas including causal reasoning, high-level hierarchical thinking, cultural evolution, theory formation, and cognitive development while also showing that thinking probabilistically can provide a genuine resolution of the age-old tension between nativism and empiricism. His rigorous mathematical and computational abilities are accompanied by an immensely creative imagination, a sure sense of the important problem, and an unerring touch for the right experiment. Griffith's Award citation and a selected biblography are also presented here.
mesh_terms: D001363:Awards and Prizes; D002140:California; D003071:Cognition; D049674:History, 21st Century; D006801:Humans; D011584:Psychology / Q000266:history