Patricia W. Cheng (born 1952) is a leading researcher in
cognitive psychologyCognitive psychology is a discipline within psychology that investigates the internal mental processes of thought such as visual processing, memory, problem solving, and language....
who works on human reasoning. She is best known for her psychological work on human understanding of
causalityCausality is the relationship between an event and a second event , where the second event is a direct consequence of the first....
. Her "power theory of the probabilistic contrast model," or power PC theory (1997)posits that people filter observations of events through a basic belief that causes have the power to generate (or prevent) their effects, thereby inferring specific cause-effect relations.
Cheng was born in
Hong KongHong Kong , officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, is a highly autonomous territory of the People's Republic of China, facing Guangdong to the north and the South China Sea to the east, west and south...
in 1952.
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Patricia W. Cheng (born 1952) is a leading researcher in
cognitive psychologyCognitive psychology is a discipline within psychology that investigates the internal mental processes of thought such as visual processing, memory, problem solving, and language....
who works on human reasoning. She is best known for her psychological work on human understanding of
causalityCausality is the relationship between an event and a second event , where the second event is a direct consequence of the first....
. Her "power theory of the probabilistic contrast model," or power PC theory (1997)posits that people filter observations of events through a basic belief that causes have the power to generate (or prevent) their effects, thereby inferring specific cause-effect relations.
Biography
Cheng was born in
Hong KongHong Kong , officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, is a highly autonomous territory of the People's Republic of China, facing Guangdong to the north and the South China Sea to the east, west and south...
in 1952. She received her B.A. from
Barnard CollegeBarnard College is a women's liberal arts college and a member of the Seven Sisters. Founded in 1889, Barnard has been affiliated with Columbia University since 1902...
, and her PhD in Psychology from the
University of MichiganThe University of Michigan, Ann Arbor is a public research university located in the state of Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university, the flagship campus of the University of Michigan, and one of the top public universities in the world...
in 1980. She then taught at the
Chinese University of Hong KongThe Chinese University of Hong Kong, commonly referred to as CUHK, is the second oldest university in Hong Kong; it is campus-based and also the only collegiate university in the territory...
. After post-doctoral training in the Department of Computer Science at Carnegie-Mellon University, she joined the faculty of the
University of California, Los AngelesThe University of California, Los Angeles is a research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, in the United States. It was founded in 1919 and is the second-oldest general-purpose campus in the University of California system...
in 1986, where she is now a Professor of Psychology. Cheng received a fellowship from the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial FoundationThe John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded in 1925 by Mr. and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim in memory of their son, who died April 26, 1922...
in 2000.
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