Keith Holyoak


Keith James Holyoak is a Canadian-American researcher in cognitive psychology and cognitive science, working on human thinking and reasoning. Holyoak's work focuses on the role of analogy in thinking. His work showed how analogy can be used to enhance learning of new abstract concepts by both children and adults, as well as how reasoning breaks down in cases of brain damage.
Holyoak is also a poet. He has published four collections of his own poems, My Minotaur, Foreigner, The Gospel According to Judas, and Oracle Bones, as well as a collection of translations of classical Chinese poetry by Li Bai and Du Fu, Facing the Moon.

Biography

Holyoak was born in Langley, British Columbia, Canada, in 1950. He received his B.A. in Psychology from the University of British Columbia in 1971, and his PhD in Psychology from Stanford University in 1976. His doctoral advisor was Gordon Bower.
He was on the faculty of the University of Michigan from 1976 to 1986, and then joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology.
He served as Chair of the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society and Editor of the journals Cognitive Psychology and Psychological Review. Holyoak is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1991, and a James McKeen Cattell Fellowship in 1999. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Association for Psychological Science, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Society of Experimental Psychologists.

Books and recordings

Cognitive science