Tom Stafford, PhD, studies learning and decision making. He is based at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom, where he is lecturer in psychology and cognitive science. His main focus is on the movement system — the idea being that if we can understand the intelligence of simple actions we will have an excellent handle on intelligence more generally. His research looks at simple decision making, and simple skilled movements, using measures of behavior informed by fundamental perspectives from the study of computation, robotics and neuroscience.

His collaboration with Peter Redgrave resulted in the novel hypothesis that Parkinson's disease could be diagnosed earlier by analyzing everyday typing behavior for errors. Leading an international research team, he is carrying out the research needed to confirm this theory.