Lucy Cheke

University of Cambridge, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence

Lecturer

Description

Lucy Cheke is an experimental psychologist at Cambridge University with a background in animal cognition research. She has worked on developing translational assessments that can be used to investigate cognition in both animals and humans using the same tasks. In particular her work has focussed on episodic memory and causal reasoning. For example, adapting the What-where-when episodic memory task, developed in food-caching birds, she has now shown that it has considerable potential for assessing episodic memory deficits in human populations (particularly aging and obesity). Similarly, adapting the Aesop’s Fable casual reasoning task (developed for rooks) she has explored the relative contribution of reward and functionality information to learning in children. For some years she has been involved with the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and in particular with the “Kinds of Intelligence” Programme, of which she has recently become director. Here, she (along with Matt Crosby, Marta Halina and others) has been particularly involved in the development of the “Animal AI” testbed, which uses tasks from animal cognition to assess AI agents.