Manikya Alister

About Me

I am a postdoc at UC Berkeley working primarily in the Computational Cognitive Science Laboratory with Bill Thompson.

Before moving to Berkeley in early 2026, I did my PhD at the University of Melbourne where I was working with Andrew Perfors and many other wonderful collaborators and mentors.

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

Academic Research

I have broad interests, but most of my current research is focused on understanding how we learn and reason from social information. Some questions I am currently focusing on include:

My work is often on the more theoretical side but I'm also interested in using these theories to understand applied questions, like how people influence each other on social media.

I have also done work in other areas such as perceptual decision-making1 2 , goal prioritisation 3, meta-science 4, and cognitive ageing. 5 6 7

Select Publications

For a full publication list, check out my CV or Google Scholar.

Alister, M. & Perfors, A. (Under Review) Reasoning from social information enables efficient human intelligence. Preprint.
Alister, M., Ransom, K. J., Perfors, A. (In Press) When a helpful bias is unhelpful: Limitations in reasoning about random and deliberately misleading evidence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Preprint.
Alister, M., Evans, N. J. (2026) A diffusion-based framework for modelling systematic, time-varying cognitive processes. Psychological Review. Link.
Alister, M., Ransom, K.J., Connor-Desai, S., Soh, E.V., Hayes, B., Perfors, A. (2025). How convincing is a crowd? Quantifying the persuasiveness of a consensus across individuals and claim types. Psychological Science. Link
Alister, M., Perfors, A. (2025). Stochastic search algorithms can tell us who to trust (and why). Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 47. Link
Alister, M., Ransom, K.J., Lua, A., Perfors, A. (2025). The impact of engagement and partisan influence campaigns in an isolated social media environment. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 47. Link

Non-academic publications and media featuring my research

Alister, M. (2025). When Consensus Changes Minds. Character & Context Link
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences (2025). ‘We are social creatures that learn from each other every day’: Manikya Alister explores social learning and decision-making.Link
Wilcox, C. (2023). The life academic: Getting your priorities straight, with a little help from science. Science Advisor. Link.
Alister, M. (2023). How does an organisation of data professionals leverage its own data? Good Data Institute. Link.

Data Science

I have experience building powerful, interactive data capabilities. For example, I have worked with the Good Data Institute to consolidate their internal database of volunteers and automate their intake processes. Additionally, I 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 and powerful data visualization libraries to analyse how narratives emerge and spread across social media.

Skills