Professor Marta Halina

I am a philosopher of science with a focus on cognitive science and biology. I received my PhD from the University of California, San Diego in 2013 and was then a McDonnell Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis until joining the University of Cambridge in 2014. In my research, I draw on both philosophy and the science of comparative cognition to address a key question: How can we best understand nonhuman minds, whether those of animals or artificial systems? For instance, in Animal Minds (2024), I explore whether animals can reason about unobservable variables and evaluate the methods used to investigate this question. For a general introduction to this area of research, see my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, 'Methods in Comparative Cognition'.

I am a Fellow of Selwyn College, a Senior Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and an Associate Editor for the journal Philosophy of Science. Within Selwyn, I serve as the Director of Studies for History and Philosophy of Science and Study Skills Tutor. Beyond my academic work, I enjoy discussing developments in the study of animal and artificial minds with the public. You can find details of my engagement activities here.

On leave in the 2026–27 academic year.

Research interests

General philosophy of science (experimentation, explanation, modelling), philosophy of psychology and cognitive science (comparative cognition, nonhuman animal cognition and communication, cognitive ethology, artificial intelligence, embodied and distributed cognition), philosophy of biology (mechanistic explanation and discovery, model organisms, cognitive evolution).

Selected publications

'Morgan’s Canon and the Associative-Cognitive Distinction Today: A Survey of Practitioners' (with Konstantinos Voudouris, Benjamin Farrar, and Lucy Cheke) Journal of Comparative Psychology (2025)

'The Animal-AI Environment: A Virtual Laboratory for Comparative Cognition and Artificial Intelligence Research' (with Voudouris et al.) Behavior Research Methods (2025).

Animal Minds (2024). Cambridge Elements in Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge University Press.

'The Future Is Computational Comparative Cognition' (with Konstantinos Voudouris and Lucy Cheke). Comparative Cognition & Behavior (2024).

'Methods in Comparative Cognition' Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2023)

'Transitions in Cognitive Evolution' (with Andrew Barron and Colin Klein) Proceedings of the Royal Society (2023)

'Unlimited Associative Learning as a Null Hypothesis' Philosophy of Science (2022)

'Insightful Artificial Intelligence' Mind & Language, 1-15 (2021)

'Minds, Machines, and Molecules' (with T. D. P. Brunet). Philosophical Topics, 48(1) (2020)

'Apply Rich Psychological Terms in AI with Care' (with Henry Shevlin). Nature Machine Intelligence, 1: 165-167 (2019)

'Not Null Enough: Pseudo-Null Hypotheses in Community Ecology and Comparative Psychology' (with William Bausman). Biology & Philosophy, 33(30): 1-20 (2018)

'The Goal of Ape Pointing' (with Katja Liebal and Michael Tomasello). PLOS ONE, 13(4):e0195182 (2018)

For a full list of publications, please see here.