Provost Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences
My research interests cover the simple cognitive mechanisms that exploit information structures in the environment to generate adaptive behavior, how such mechanisms evolve, and the ways in which evolution, cognition, and other adaptive processes (including learning and culture) can interact with each other. Research projects currently underway include studies of sequential choice (including the search for jobs, mates, or parking spaces), simple heuristics for decision making and how they can be learned, the benefits of cognitive limits, heuristics for food choice, judging animate intentions from motion trajectories (by children and adults), evolution of rhythmic and other musical behavior, and the evolution of learning. I explore questions in these areas primarily by modeling empirical results with individual-based simulations of adaptive agents behaving in structured environments (whose structure in turn can be affected by the agents' own behavior).
The College of Arts