Keith Holyoak

Keith Holyoak is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, a member of the Brain Research Institute, and co-director (with Patricia Cheng) of the UCLA Reasoning Lab. His research integrates behavioral studies, neuroimaging, and neural-network modeling to illuminate how humans—especially the prefrontal cortex—support reasoning, problem solving, and creative thought through analogy.

Education

• Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology (specific institution not stated in text)

Research Focus

Holyoak’s work centers on analogical reasoning as a core mechanism for learning and knowledge transfer. He investigates:

• Development of analogical capacity in children and its evolution in primates.
• Neuropsychological consequences of prefrontal damage on complex reasoning.
• Computational models (with John Hummel) that use neural synchrony for dynamic variable binding to represent symbolic knowledge.
• Applications of analogy in law, politics, and scientific discovery.

Recent extensions explore how large language models exhibit emergent analogical abilities compared to humans, and how older adults retain or even surpass younger adults in metaphor comprehension.

Publication Trends

Across 2022-2025 his articles cluster into four major streams: (1) benchmarking and understanding emergent analogical reasoning in large language models; (2) neural and cognitive mechanisms of relational and metaphorical understanding; (3) computational models of visual analogy and relational category learning; and (4) applied cognition—copyright judgments of AI art, decision-making in law, and educational uses of analogy.

Funding & Collaborations

The UCLA Reasoning Lab is currently funded by the National Science Foundation and Google. Holyoak collaborates closely with:

• Patricia Cheng (co-director, Reasoning Lab)
• Barbara Knowlton (neuropsychology of reasoning)
• John Hummel (computational modeling)
• Hongjing Lu (Computational Vision and Learning Lab)
• Dan Simon (decision-making and law)

Advising & Mentoring

Together with his collaborators, Holyoak mentors graduate students and post-doctoral researchers in psychology, cognitive science, and computational modeling. Specific student names are not listed in the provided text.