Patrick Shafto

Who I am

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at University of Louisville . I received my PhD from the Psychology Department at Northeastern University in Experimental Psychology in 2004 and spent 3 years at MIT in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences before arriving at Louisville.

On the right is a picture of me from a not-so-recent lab retreat. I appear exceedingly excited to be at the "Donkey Hill Cutoff".

Email me at p.shafto at louisville dot edu.

See my Curriculum Vitae.

Papers

Shafto, P. & Goodman, N. (under review). Teaching games: Statistical sampling assumptions for pedagogical situations. (pdf)

Shafto, P. Kemp, C., Bonawitz, E.B., Coley, J.D., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (under review). Inductive reasoning about causally transmitted properties. Cognition.

Tenenebaum, J.B., Kemp, C. & Shafto, P. (2007). Theory-based Bayesian models of inductive reasoning. To appear in Feeney, A. & Heit, E. (Eds.), Induction, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Shafto, P., Vitkin, A. & Coley, J.D. (2007). Availability in category-based induction. To appear in Feeney, A. & Heit, E. (Eds.), Induction, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Feeney, A., Shafto, P. & Dunning, D. (2007). Who is susceptible to the conjunction fallacy in category-based induction? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

Shafto, P. Coley, J.D. & Baldwin, D. (2007). Effects of time-pressure on context-sensitive property induction. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. (pdf)

Kemp, C., Shafto, P., Berke, A. & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2006). Combining causality and similarity-based reasoning. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. (pdf)

Shafto, P. Kemp, C., Mansinghka, V., Gordon, M., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2006). Learning cross-cutting systems of categories. Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. (pdf)

Shafto, P., Kemp, C., Baraff, E., Coley, J.D. & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2005). Context-sensitive induction. In the Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society . (pdf)

Coley, J.D., Shafto, P., Stepanova, O., & Baraff, E. (2005). Knowledge and category-based induction. In Ahn, W., Goldstone, R.L., Love, B.C., Markman, A.B., & Wolff, P. (Eds.), Categorization inside and outside the laboratory: Essays in honor of Douglas L. Medin. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. (pdf)

Shafto, P. & Coley, J.D. (2003). Development of categorization and reasoning in the natural world: Novices to experts, naive similarity to ecological knowledge. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 29, 641-649. (pdf)

Coley, J.D., Solomon, G.E.A., & Shafto P. (2002). The development of folkbiology: A cognitive science persepective on children's understanding of the biological world. In Kahn, P. & Kellert, S. (Eds.), Children and nature: Psychological, sociocultural, and evolutionary investigations. (65-91). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Ahn, W., Kalish, C., Gelman, S.A., Medin, D.L., Luhnmann, C., Atran, S., Coley, J.D., & Shafto P. (2001). Why essences are essential in the psychology of concepts. Cognition, 82, 59-69. (pdf)

Other Interests

In my free time, I play rugby for the Louisville Rugby Football Club . I am also an alumnus and former coach of the Northeastern University Men's Rugby Football Club .

I speak a bit of Polish.

I am also a licensed Physical Therapist in the state of Massachussetts, a remnant of my previous studies in the Department of Physical Therapy at Northeastern University.