Prof. Dr. Ulrike Hahn

Ulrike Hahn first qualified as a lawyer, passing both her 1st and 2nd State Law Exam in the state of Bavaria, Germany, before taking a Masters in Cognitive Science and Natural Language at the University of Edinburgh. This was followed by a DPhil in Experimental Psychology from Oxford University on the topic of rules and similarity in categorization. On completion of her doctorate, she moved to the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick as a lecturer, moving on after two years to the School of Psychology at Cardiff University where she remained for 14 years. Since 2012 she has been in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck College, University of London, where she also director of the Centre for Cognition Computation and Modelling.

Research Interests

Ulrike Hahn’s research interests are categorization, similarity, language and language acquisition, and, first and foremost, questions of human rationality. Her research examines human judgment, decision-making, and the rationality of everyday argument. She is presently particularly interested in the role of perceived source reliability on our beliefs, including our beliefs as parts of larger communicative social networks.

Further Activities

Ulrike Hahn is presently a member of the Senior Editorial Board of “Topics in Cognitive Science” and an Action Editor for Frontiers in Cognitive Science and for Frontiers in Social Psychology. She also served as an Action Editor for “Psychonomic Bulletin & Review” from 2008-2012, and as a consulting editor for Psychological Review from 2009-2010.

She has also served on the programme committee for international conferences, including the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, the Conference on Experimental Pragmatics, XPrag 2011. The International Conference on Thinking, ICT 2012, 2015, and the forthcoming 1^st European Conference on Argumentation, Lisbon, June 2015.

Recent and Forthcoming Publications

• Zhao, J., Hahn, U., & Osherson, D. (in press). Perception and identification of random events. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.
• Maio, G.R., Hahn, U., Frost, J-M., Kuppens, Rehman, T.N., & Kamble, S. (2014) Social Values as Arguments: Similar is Convincing. Frontiers in Psychology.
• Hahn, U. (2014) The Bayesian Boom: Good thing or bad? Frontiers in Cognitive Science, Vol. 5, Article 765.
• Hahn, U. (2014). Experiential limitation in judgment and decision. Topics in Cognitive Science, 6, 229-244.
• Jarvstad, A., Hahn, U.,Warren, P., & Rushton, S., (2014) Are perceptuo-motor decisions really more optimal than cognitive decisions? Cognition, 130, 397-416.
• Hahn, U. & Harris, A.J.L. (2014) What does it mean to be biased: rationality and motivated reasoning. The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Vol. 61, 41-102.
• Jarvstad, A., Hahn, U., Rushton, S., & Warren, P. (2013) Perceptuo-motor, cognitive and description-based decisions seem equally good. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. 110(40), 16271-16276.
• Evans, L.E., Maio, G, Corner, A.J, Hodgetts, C. J.,Ahmed, S & Hahn, U. (2013) Self-interest and pro-environmental behavior. Nature Climate Change, 3, 122–125.