I am an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Computer Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of Louisville. I received my PhD in Experimental Psychology from Northeastern University working with John Coley, and spent 3 years at MIT working with Josh Tenenbaum before arriving at Louisville.

My research focuses on understanding learning. This leads me to draw upon a variety of fields including Psychology, Education, Computer Science, and Statistics. The goal is to identify tools and methods for facilitating learning and use these to affect change in practically relevant contexts.

I am always looking for undergraduate and grad students (and sometimes postdocs). If you are potentially interested, please check out the research page and email me if you are interested.

Email me at p.shafto at louisville dot edu.

See my Curriculum Vitae.

Press:

My research has been featured in the popular press, including articles in the Economist, Slate magazine and in Discover magazine. These are good places to get started if you are interested in the work that goes on my the lab.

Funding:

My research is currently funded by: 

• a CAREER award from the NSF Research and Evaluation on Education in Science and Engineering (REESE) program
• the DARPA XData program, which seeks to create tools for facilitating analysis of very large data sets

Papers:

Forthcoming

Mansinghka, V.K., Shafto, P., Jonas, E., Petschulat, C., Gasner, M., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (accepted pending revision). CrossCat:A fully Bayesian nonparametric method for analyzing heterogeneous, high dimensional data. Journal of Machine Learning Research.

2012

Eaves, B. & Shafto, P. (2012). Unifying pedagogical reasoning and epistemic trust. In Xu. F. and Kushnir, T. (Eds.) Advances in Child Development and Behavior. (pdf)

Shafto, P., Goodman, N.D., & Frank, M.C. (2012). Learning from others: The consequences of psychological reasoning for human learning. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7, 341-351, (pdf)

Shafto, P., Eaves, B., Navarro, D.J., & Perfors, A. (2012). Epistemic trust: Modeling children's reasoning about others' knowledge and intent. Developmental Science, 15, 436-447. (pdf)

Kemp, C., Shafto, P., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2012). An integrated account of generalization across objects and features. Cognitive Psychology, 64, 35-73. (pdf)

Shafto, P., Gweon, H., Fargen, C. & Schulz, L. (2012). Enough is enough: Inductive sufficiency guides learners' ratings of informant helpfulness. Proceedings of the 34th annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pdf)

Gonzalez, A., Shafto, P., Bonawitz, E.B. & Gopnik, A. (2012). Is that your final answer? The effects of neutral queries on children's choices. Proceedings of the 34th annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pdf)

 2011

Bonawitz, E.B.*, Shafto, P.*, Gweon, H., Goodman, N.D., Spelke, E. & Schulz, L. (2011). The double-edged sword of pedagogy: Instruction affects spontaneous exploration and discovery. Cognition, 120, 322-330. (pdf)

Shafto, P., Kemp, C., Mansinghka, V.K., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2011). A probabilistic model of cross-categorization. Cognition, 120, 1-25. (pdf)

Buchbaum, D., Griffiths, T.L., Gopnik, A. & Shafto, P. (2011). Children’s imitation of causal action sequences is influenced by statistical and pedagogical evidence. Cognition, 120, 331-340. (pdf)

Warner, R., Stoess, T., & Shafto, P. (2011). Reasoning about teaching and misleading situations. Proceedings of the 33rd annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pdf)

Montague, R., Navarro, D.J., Perfors, A., Warner, R. & Shafto, P. (2011). To catch a liar: The effects of truthful and deceptive testimony on inferential learning. Proceedings of the 33rd annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pdf)

Smith, N.A. & Shafto, P. (2011). The role of cross-cutting systems of categories in category-based induction. Proceedings of the 33rd annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pdf)

Rafferty, A., Brunskill, E., Shafto, P., & Griffiths, T.L. (2011). Faster teaching by POMDP planning. Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED). (pdf)

Li, D. & Shafto, P. (2011). Bayesian hierarchical cross-clustering. Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS). (pdf)

 2010

Shafto, P., Goodman, N.D., Gerstle, B. & Ladusaw, F. (2010). Prior expectations in pedagogical situations. Proceedings of the 32nd annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pdf)

Li, D., Rouchka, E. & Shafto, P. (2010). Phylogenomic analysis using Bayesian congruence measuring. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computation (BICoB). (pdf)

 2009

Bonawitz, E.B., Shafto, P., Gweon, H., Chang, I. Katz, S., & Schulz, L. (2009). The double-edged sword of pedagogy: Modeling the effect of pedagogical contexts on preschoolers' exploratory play. Proceedings of the 31st annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. (pdf)

Warner, R. Shafto, P., Baker, C.L., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2009). Abstract knowledge guides prediction and search in novel situations. Proceedings of the 31st annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. (pdf)

 2008

Shafto, P., Kemp, C., Bonawitz, E.B., Coley, J.D., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2008). Inductive reasoning about causally transmitted properties. Cognition. 109, 175-192. (pdf)

Shafto, P. & Goodman, N. (2008). Teaching games: Statistical sampling assumptions for learning in pedagogical situations. Proceedings of the 30th annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pdf)

 2007

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

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

Feeney, A., Shafto, P., & Dunning, D. (2007). Who is susceptible to the conjunction fallacy in category-based induction? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14, 884-889. (pdf)

Shafto, P., Coley, J.D., & Baldwin, D. (2007). Effects of time pressure on context-sensitive property induction. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14, 890-894. (pdf)

 2006

Kemp, C., Shafto, P., Berke, A., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2006). Combining causal and similarity-based reasoning. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. Best Student Paper, Honorable Mention, NIPS 2006. (pdf)

Shafto, P., Kemp, C., Mansinghka, V.K., Gordon, M., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2006). Learning cross-cutting systems of categories. Proceedings of the 28th annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pdf)

 2005

Shafto, P., Kemp, C., Baraff, E., Coley, J.D., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2005). Context-sensitive induction. Proceedings of the 27th annual conference 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, DC: American Psychological Association. (pdf)

< 2004

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 perspective 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. (pdf)

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