Selected Publications


Gates, V.*, Callaway, F.*, Ho, M.K., and Griffiths, T. (2021). A rational model of people’s inferences about others’ preferences based on response times. Cognition, 217, 104885. (pdf, supp_material) *Authors contributed equally.

Gates, V., Suchow, J.W., and Griffiths, T.L. (2021). Memory transmission in small groups and large networks: An empirical study. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 1-8. (pdf, supp_material)

Gates, V., Griffiths, T.L., and Dragan, A.D. (2020). How to be helpful to multiple people at once. Cognitive Science, 44(6). (pdf, supp_methods, supp_results)

Fisac, J.F., Gates, M.A., Hamrick, J.B., Liu, C., Hadfield-Menell, D., Palaniappan, M., Malik, D., Sastry, S.S., Griffiths, T.L. and Dragan, A.D. (2017). Pragmatic-Pedagogic Value Alignment. International Symposium on Robotics Research. Awarded second place for the Blue Sky Paper awards. (arXiv)


Extended Publication List

(Google Scholar). Previously, published under M.A. Gates.

Gates, V., Hsiao, M., Zieve, G.G., Courry, R., and Persons, J.B. (2021). Relationship to CBT outcome and dropout of decision support tools of the written case formulation, list of treatment goals and plot of symptom scores. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 142, 103874. (pdf)

Ibraheem, S., Gates, V., DeNero, J., and Griffiths, T.L. (2020). Investigating the Behavior of Malicious Actors Through the Game of Mafia. Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

Gates, V. and Persons, J.B. (2019, November). Effects of therapist decision-making tools on outcome and dropout of naturalistic cognitive behavioral therapy. In J.B. Persons (Chair), Improving Treatment Outcome with Clinical Decision-making Tools. Symposium conducted at the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, Atlanta, GA.

Gates, M.A., Veuthey, T.L., Tessler, M.H., Smith, K.A., Gerstenberg, T., Bayet, L., and Tenebaum, J.B. (2018). Tiptoeing around it: Inference from absence in potentially offensive speech. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pdf)

Gates, M.A., Suchow, J.W., and Griffiths, T.L. (2017). Empirical tests of large-scale collaborative recall. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Selected for oral presentation. (pdf)

Wang, R., Gates, M.A., Perez-Pozuelo, I., Shen, Y., Tino, P., Welchman, A., and Kourtzi, Z. Learning predictive temporal structure under uncertainty. Program No. 085.18. 2018 Neuroscience Meeting Planner. San Diego, CA: Society for Neuroscience, 2018. Online.

Gagin, G., Bohon, K.S., Butensky, A., Gates, M.A., Hu, J.Y., Lafer-Sousa, R., Pulumo, R.L., Qu, J., Stoughton, C.M., Swanbeck, S.N. and Conway, B.R. (2014). Color-detection thresholds in rhesus macaque monkeys and humans. Journal of Vision, 14(8), 12. (pdf)


Postdoc Research

Results presented on the website: AI Risk Discussions


PhD Thesis

Formalizing and Testing Computational Cognitive Models of Social Collaboration, under Tom Griffiths

My research is broadly aimed at developing computational models of social cognition. I am interested in how people can infer beliefs and intentions in others, by observing others’ actions and employing recursive theory-of-mind (e.g. inverse reinforcement learning, social psychology). I am also interested in group-level equilibria when agents are collaborating or competing (e.g. game theory, agent-based modeling). Finally, I am interested in mechanism design and other ways quantitative characterizations of a phenomenon can be used to predict and shape behavior.


Masters in Research Thesis

Impact of Task Structure on Strategies in Statistical Learning , under Zoe Kourtzi


Undergraduate Thesis

Neural Correlates of the Bezold-Brücke Perceptual Color Shift , under Bevil Conway