Mayrhofer, Ralf

I am a postdoctoral research scientist in my own research project “Agents and causes: Reconciling competing theories of causal reasoning” (DFG Ma 6545/1) at the Psychology Department of the University of Göttingen, Germany. The research project is part of the interdisciplinary priority program “New frameworks of rationality” (SPP 1516) of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

I studied psychology, economics, and business information systems. I obtained my PhD in psychology (minors: computational science and statistics) in 2009 within the interdisciplinary graduate program “Applied statistics and empirical methods” at the Center of Statistics (University of Göttingen).

I am particularly interested in causal learning and reasoning, causal semantics, intuitive physics, categorization, and explanatory reasoning at the interdisciplinary boundaries of cognitive psychology, computer science, philosophy, and linguistics. To address my research questions, I typically combine experimental methods and mathematical modeling (esp. Bayesian modeling).

I offer/offered (*) or co-organized courses in psychology and statistics, such as *Bayesian statistics, cognitive science (causal reasoning, causal perception), *scientific writing, *mathematical statistics, and experimental psychology.