DYLAN EVANS: CURRENT INTERESTS

My interests are wide-ranging:

EMOTION: In my PhD thesis, and in my first post-doc at King's College London, I explored the psychological literature that investigates the way in which emotions help and hinder the decision-making process. In particular, I developed a view of emotions as heuristics that constrain the possible range of outcomes considered during the decision-making process. In other words, emotions may serve to render salient only a tiny proportion of the available alternatives and of the conceivably relevant facts. Thus they winnow down to manageable size the number of considerations relevant to deliberation.

I later went on to write computer models which attempted to expand the rational-choice theory of decision-making by including elements of real human decision-making, such as motivational bias. For example, during my second post-doc, at the University of Bath, I constructed a multi-agent based model in which agents that incorporated emotional factors into their decision-making processes outperformed those that did not.

I'm now looking at how this understanding of the role of emotion in decision-making can be used to build better decision-support systems: that, is, computers that help people make decisions. I'm doing this at the Cork Constraint Computation Centre, in the Department of Computer Science at University College Cork.

EVOLUTION & EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY: I am fascinated by the process of natural selection, and especially the light that Darwin's theory can throw on the workings of the human mind. I have written introductions to evolution and to evolutionary psychology, and am interested in the possibility of testing evolutionary psychology hypotheses by computer simulations - a research program I call "synthetic evolutionary psychology".

ROBOTICS: During my tenure as Senior Lecturer in Intelligent Autonomous Systems at the University of the West of England, I developed artificial models of emotion and conducted research on human-robot interaction. The models of emotion were intended to help robots make decisions in ways similar to those employed by humans.

GLOBAL CATASTROPHIC RISK: In 2006-7 I led a project investigating the possibility that global civilisation may collapse within the new few decades. To discover what life might be life in the aftermath of global collapse, I set up a simulation in which volunteers lived as if there had been a major failure of national infrastructure. I am currently in the process of writing up this research.

This page was last updated: 5 January 2008.