Thomas Hills (Professor)

BNS: LMS

Cognitive Search: Evolution Algorithms and the Brain. MIT Press.

email: t.t.hills (at) warwick.ac.uk

tel: (024) 765 23183

Interests:

I study search behaviour and the trade-off between exploration and exploitation across domains as diverse as space, mind, and society. This work aims to understand how humans navigate complex information environments (e.g., memory, decision making, and creativity) and how these environments evolve and develop in response.

My research uses experiments, big data, network science, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and mathematical models, with applications to behavioural and cognitive science.

My book on Behavioral Network Science: Language, Mind, and Society with Cambridge University Press has a webpage, code, and teaching materials available here.

I am the Director of the Behavioural and Data Science MSc.

My former PhD students Eugene Malthouse and Charlie Pilgrim help run the Collective Decision Making and Culture Lab with collaborators from over 30 nations.

Some fun articles for the casual reader:

Does my algorithm have a mental health problem, published in Aeon.

Masters of reality: The evolution of shamanism, published in Aeon.

The Macroscope for exploring the historical structure of English

A checklist for scientific writing

PUBLICATIONS and pdfs

Some recent Publications:

• Hills, T. (2025). Could you be wrong: Debiasing LLMs using a metacognitive prompt for improving human decision making. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10124.
• Hills, T. (2025). Cognitive network enrichment, not degradation, explains the aging mental lexicon and links fluid and crystallized intelligence. Psychological Review, Advance online publication.
• Hills, T. (2025). Behavioral Network Science: Language, Mind, and Society. Cambridge University Press.
• Jeong, D., & Hills, T. (2024). Age-related diversification and specialization in the mental lexicon: Comparing aggregate and individual-level network approaches. Cognitive Science, 40, e70008. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.70008
• Hills, T. & Kenett, Y (2024). An entropy modulation theory of creative exploration. Psychological Review. 10.1037/rev0000511Link opens in a new window
• Li, H. and Hills, T. (2024). Time, valence, and imagination: A comparative study of thoughts in restricted and unrestricted mind wandering. Psychological Research. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00426-024-01969-2
• Pilgrim, C., Sanborn, A., Malthouse, E., and Hills, T. (2024). Confirmation bias emerges from an approximation to Bayesian reasoning. Cognition. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105693Link opens in a new window

• Ovando Tellez, M., Kenett, Y. N., Benedek, M., Hills, T. T., Beranger, B., Lopez-Perseem, A., Bieth, T., & Volle, E. (2024). Switching, fast and slow: Deciphering the dynamics of memory search, its brain connectivity patterns, and its role in creativity, Research Square. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-3826172/v1

• Pilgrim, C., Guo, W., & Hills, T. (2024). The rising entropy of english in the attention economy. Nature Communications Psychology.

Download open access versions of publications

Supervisor to:

Danyang Hu
Dasol Jeong
Halleyson Li
Charlie Pilgrim