Welcome

My name is Simon Dennis and I am a husband, a father, a mentor and friend.

I am also the Director of the Complex Human Data Hub within the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences and CEO of Unforgettable Research Services.

The Complex Human Data Hub‘s primary aim is to develop Computational Behavioural Science – bringing computational methods to bear on big data to better understand psychological processes.

Unforgettable Research Services allows people to build their own big data assets that they can lease to researchers. The objective is to return the power of big data to the people who create it.

In this blog, I share some of my reflections on computational models of memory and language and the tools and services required to investigate the mind in the age of big data. I will sketch some of the projects our group is doing and give you an inside view on how we go about developing and testing theories.

Publications are the finished and sanitised products of research. But along the way there are starts, stops and back tracks that are lost in the official record but are really what research is all about. The motivations that lead to certain decisions are often too speculative to appear in print, but they are important to understanding the process. I hope to provide insight into the messy but fascinating underbelly of our science.

Having said that here are a few of my publications to give you an sense of what I study:

Nielson, D. M., Smith, T. A., Sreekumar, V., Dennis, S., & Sederberg, P. B. (2015). Human hippocampus represents space and time during retrieval of real-world memories. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,112(35), 11078-11083.

Osth, A. F., & Dennis, S. (2015). Sources of interference in item and associative recognition memory. Psychological Review, 122(2), 260-311.

Sloutsky, V. M., Yim, H., Yao, X., & Dennis, S. (2017). An associative account of the development of word learning. Cognitive Psychology, 97, 1-30.

I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land where I live and work, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations, and pay my respects to the Elders both past and present.