Faculty Profile

Baine Craft

Baine Craft

Professor of Psychology and Biology; Director of Undergraduate Research, Psychology

Email: craftb@spu.edu
Phone: 206-281-2182
Office: Marston 111


Education: BS, Mississippi College, 2001; MA, University of Montana, 2004; PhD, University of Montana, 2005. At SPU since 2006.

Baine Craft holds a joint appointment as a faculty member in the School of Psychology, Family and Community as well as the Biology Department at Seattle Pacific University. 

In addition, Dr. Craft is the primary investigator in SPU's Learning and Cognition Lab.

Trained in the area of comparative animal behavior, learning, and cognition, Dr. Craft works alongside student research assistants in the Learning and Cognition Lab to study choice or foraging behavior. His work focuses on two areas of choice behavior, risk-sensitive foraging and self-control. In particular, he is interested in how factors such as learning, delay to reward, and patch quality cause a forager to develop a specific choice bias or change choices.   

Dr. Craft teaches courses in “Learning and Behavior,” “Cognitive Psychology,” “Statistics,” “Animal Behavior,” and “Research Design.”  


Selected Publications

  • Craft, B.B.; Church, A.C.; Rohrbach, C.M.; and Bennett, J.C. (2011). The effects of reward quality on risk-sensitivity in Rattus norvegicus.” Behavioural Processes 88, 44–46.
  • Craft, B.B.; Szalda-Petree, A.D.; Brenniger, J.; and Haddad, N.F. (2007). “The effects of discriminative stimuli on choice behavior in male Siamese fighting fish (Betta splendens).” Perceptual and Motor Skills 104, 575–80.

Please see Dr. Crafts’s CV (PDF) for additional publications.

Biology | Why I Teach

Why I Teach at SPU

Baine Craft, Associate Professor of Biology; Director of Undergraduate Research

“Seattle Pacific University stands in a unique place in higher education. We are small enough that students can interact directly with faculty, but we are big enough to provide students with exceptional job skills and opportunities such as research and internships. All of this with an emphasis on understanding, integrating, and practicing one’s faith within his or her specific academic discipline. For me, I love that balance, and that is why I teach at SPU.”