Professor Ruth Byrne is a globally acknowledged scholarly leader in the field of Cognitive Psychology: a psychological scientist who has advanced our understanding of the human mind. She has made a distinguished scholarly contribution to psychology through her research on human reasoning and imagination including experimental and computational investigations of reasoning and imaginative thought.

Her discovery that certain kinds of background knowledge can suppress even the simplest of deductive inferences has attracted experimental study worldwide. Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have modelled it to improve the flexibility of reasoning in AI programmes. It has also led to important theoretical developments in the characterisation of human reasoning. Her work on the human imagination provided for the first time an experimentally tested account of the processes underlying a central aspect of imaginative thought, the creation of alternatives to reality.