Enhancing Thinking

This research theme is concerned with thinking processes such as reasoning, problem solving, decision making, and creative thinking. Our work aims to understand the fundamental mechanisms underlying these skills, their interaction with emotion processing, and their enhancement and use to assess risk and benefits, judge probability and utility, conduct more fair science about other people, categorise and classify, at the levels of the brain, the individual, the group, the organisation and society.

Enhancing thinking skills is beneficial across numerous real-world domains including health, criminal justice, defence and security, business and organisations, science policy, and education. For instance, our work enhances the individual decisions that people make about engaging in activities to promote psychological and physical well-being, the group decision-making in organisations such as juries, expert committees and healthcare providers, and enhances the provision of education and training that best promotes the optimal development of thinking skills. Impacts in these domains are achieved by dissemination and engagement with policy-makers and practitioners. For instance, our work on graphing was cited by the 6th edition of the American Psychological Association's Manual of Style and the members of the Food, Consumer Behaviour and Health Research Centre (FCBH) advised on the design of the UK government’s programme of research to evaluate the impact of front of pack (FOP) nutrition signpost labelling schemes on purchasing behaviour and consumer knowledge.

The ‘enhancing thinking’ theme cuts across traditional research groupings of Psychological Science drawing together on-going work in cognition, development, psychological neuroscience, forensic psychology, health psychology, social psychology, and the history of psychology.

The following sections provide further description of work targeted at understanding some of the fundamental mechanisms of thinking and the application of this understanding to enhance thinking and behaviour in different domains.