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Manikya Alister
PhD Candidate The University of Melbournes
I’m a PhD candidate in computational cognitive science at the Complex Human Data Hub within the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences. I also work casually as a freelance data scientist and academic tutor (TA).

About Me

I build experiments and develop computational models to explain and predict how people learn and make decisions.

I’m on the lookout for postdoc positions starting between March and September 2025. If your lab is hiring or you know of a position or fellowship that I would be a good fit for, please get in touch.

Academic Research

I have research and teaching experience across several areas including psychology, neuroscience, and statistics (check out the “CV” tab to see more detail).

I have broad interests, but my main focus at the moment is understanding how social inference underpins our ability to perform efficient cognition. Some questions I am currently focusing on include:

  • What kinds of assumptions do we make about the people that we learn from and why?
  • Under what circumstances are we more or less persuaded by social testimony?
  • What happens to our cognitive mechanisms over time as we learn to trust/distrust someone?

I have also published in other areas such as perceptual decision-making, social cognition, goal prioritisation, and meta-science. In 2020 I graduated with a Bachelor of Psychological Science (Honours) from the University of Queensland (UQ). In my Honours year I won the McElwain prize for the best Honours thesis in Psychology and also graduated top of my cohort, winning the Australian Psychological Society Prize for UQ and a University Medal.

Data Science

I have experience building powerful, interactive data capabilities. I have worked with the Good Data Institute to consolidate their internal database of volunteers and automate their intake processes. I also designed and deployed a web-based dashboard using R shiny that informs and visualizes several aspects of their organisation including the diversity and equity of their volunteers and project impact (see this blog post I wrote about the project). I also worked with the University of Adelaide and the Defense Science and Technologies Group to build a software prototype that leverages state of the art NLP techniques like BERTopics and other transformer based tools, and powerful data visualization libraries such as JavaScript’s D3, to analyse how narratives emerge and spread across social media.

Skills

  • Research design
  • Data analysis
  • Statistical & computational modelling
  • Software and data engineering
  • Data visualisation
  • Bayesian inference
  • Public speaking

Publications

  • Alister, M., Herbert, S., Sewell, DK., Neal, A. Ballard, TJ., (2023). The Impact of Cognitive Resource Constraints on Goal Prioritization. Cognitive Psychology. Link.
  • Alister, M., Ransom, K. J., & Perfors, A. (2023). Inferring the truth from deception: What can people learn from helpful and unhelpful information providers? Proc. of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society . Link.
  • Alister, M., McKay, K.T., Sewell, D.K., & Evans, N.J., (2023). Uncovering the Cognitive Processes Underlying the Gaze Cueing Effect. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. Link.
  • McKay K.T., Grainger S.A, Alister, M.,, Henry, J.D., (2023) Enhancing Ecological Validity of Gaze-Cueing Stimuli is Associated with Increased Gaze Following for Older but not Younger Adults. Psychology and Ageing . Link.
  • Alister, M., Perfors, A., & Ransom, K. J. (2022). Source independence affects argument persuasiveness when the relevance is clear. Proc. of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society . Link.
  • McKay, K.T. Talipski, L.A., Grainger, S.A, Alister, M., Henry, J.D. (2022). How Does Ageing Affect Social Attention? A Test of Competing Theories using Multi-Level Meta-Analysis. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B. Link.
  • Alister, M., Vickers-Jones, R., Sewell, D.K., and Ballard, T.J., (2021). How do we choose our giants? Perceptions of replicability in psychological science. Advancements in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science. Link.

Under Review

  • Alister, M. , Ransom, K.J., Connor-Desai, S., Soh, E.V. Hayes, B., Perfors, A. How convincing is a crowd? Quantify- ing the persuasiveness of a consensus across individuals and claim types.

  • Alister, M. , Evans, Nathan J. ParAcT-DDM: A diffusion-based framework for modelling systematic, time-varying cognitive processes.

Non-academic publications and articles featuring my research

  • Wilcox, C. Science Advisor. Getting your priorities straight, with a little help from science. Link.
  • Alister , M. Good Data Institute. How does an organisation of data professionals leverage its own data? Link.

Hire me

I’m due to finish my PhD between March and September 2025, and am on the lookout for postdoc positions.

CV