Cognitive Science

I consider it a great privilege to be able to contribute to advancing basic scientific knowledge about the function of the mind. I have broadly contributed, and continue to remain interested in contributing to the following themes in basic cognitive research

1. Preference formation. This was the theme of my dissertation research, which was a synoptic exploration of the fundamental characteristics of human decision-making. In the course of this work, I zoomed in on two observations that seemed to impose important limitations on the sort of computational models that can be tenable. The first was that humans store a very coarse representation of what-to-do instead of granular representations of value, of the form common in AI models. I've published a number of papers arguing for the existence of this limitation and its consequences. It continues to remain a focus of active research in my lab. The other limitation I argue for is that people make decisions using a very small subset of the total amount of information available to them, they are frugal in their information use. I have published some work mapping out some predictions that such frugal preference formation would entail in typical experimental settings, but have yet to find a solid experimental design to characterize this frugality empirically.
2. Memory. My interest in memory derives, both chronologically and logically, from my interest in peoples' meta-decisions to be frugal in their information use. Clearly, this frugality of information processing has to be embedded in the function of retrieval from long-term memory. I have published computational and empirical research exploring this interaction between memory and judgments, and remain interested in working in this space.
3. Perception. While my core research lives in investigating the memory-action-preference-memory loop, the loop is incomplete without taking into account embodied biases in information representations introduced by perceptual processes. I have published some computational and empirical work documenting top-down control of perceptual precision in human vision, but am still at the beginning stages of fleshing out a research agenda in perception.