Dr Alice Liefgreen

Honorary Appointment (Arts), Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Available For Postgraduate Supervision

About

Alice is an experimental psychologist working on the UKRI-funded TRUE project with Prof. Yvonne McDermott-Rees, investigating the impact of deepfakes on trust in user-generated evidence in accountability processes for human rights violations.

Alice obtained a PhD in Experimental Psychology at University College London (UCL) in February 2022. Her thesis presented a descriptive framework of how people acquire, evaluate, and integrate information under uncertainty, and outlined the psychological mechanisms underpinning these sense-making processes. Her work included both laboratory experiments and naturalistic studies which investigated these processes in real-world domains including intelligence analysis and criminal investigations.

Her research has so far focused on investigating the psychological underpinnings of human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty, predominantly utilising a causal Bayesian framework.

Prior to obtaining a PhD, Alice completed an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL (2015-2016) and a BSc (Hons) in Psychology at the University of Bath (2011-2015).

Areas Of Expertise

  • Causal reasoning
  • Evidential reasoning
  • Causal Bayesian Networks
  • Judgment and Decision-Making
  • Legal reasoning
  • Information seeking
  • Explanation
  • Mixed research methods

Career Highlights

Research

Alice’s research interests are judgment and decision-making, and causal and evidential reasoning. She has investigated how people reason and make judgments under uncertainty by a) comparing their reasoning inferences against normative causal Bayesian models of evidential reasoning and b) enriching these computational frameworks by considering the factors that lead people to at times deviate from normative predictions, such as the use of heuristics and alternative strategies.

Alice has so far applied her work to legal-investigative domains, impact-based weather forecasting and intelligence analysis. Her research utilises both constrained laboratory tasks as well as naturalistic studies – with the aim of informing the development of solutions that help practitioners maximise reasoning and decision-making accuracy and efficiency in their practice.

Collaborations