John Paul Minda is a Professor of Psychology, an associate director of the Western Institute for Neuroscience, author, and an award-winning lecturer. Dr. Minda received his bachelor’s degree from Hiram College, a PhD from the University of Buffalo, and was a Beckman Fellow at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois. Dr. Minda’s academic research is directed at understanding how we organize our experiences into categories and concepts and how these concepts influence our behaviours, plans, and decisions. His work on prototype theory and multiple-systems theories of categorization have helped to further our understanding of how children, adults, animals, and machines learn to generalize. Dr. Minda teaches on many topics related to cognitive psychology and was the 2020 recipient of the “Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching” at Western and the 2023 Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance “Teaching Excellence Awards”. Dr. Minda is also the author of the best-selling textbook, “The Psychology of Thinking”, now in its second edition, and the popular non-fiction book “How to Think”. Dr. Minda lives in London, Ontario with his family and when he’s not reading, researching, or writing, he’s usually out running.
