Dr. Patricia Cheng conducts psychological research on inductive and deductive reasoning. She graduated from Barnard College and went on to receive her PhD in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1980. She then taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and completed post-doctoral training in the Department of Computer Science at Carnegie-Mellon University. Since 1986 she has been on the faculty of the Department of Psychology at UCLA. Cheng developed the theory of pragmatic reasoning schemas in collaboration with Holyoak, which provided the first general account of the influence of content on deductive reasoning in the domain of social regulations. Her current research is primarily directed at understanding the acquisition of causal knowledge. Cheng and her collaborator Laura Novickof Vanderbilt University developed the power PC theory of causal induction, presented in a series of articles published in the Psychological Review. Cheng was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000, and is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.
