I am a cognitive scientist in the Department of Psychology at Wesleyan University. My research focus is the scientific study of adult human reasoning and decision making behavior. I am interested in how decisions are made, how and why people vary in their decision making strategies, how underlying cognitive and motivational mechanisms give rise to differences, and ultimately how to improve decision making. I am also interested in category use in reasoning, including how categories support inference in judgment and decision making, and in the use of principles of cognitive psychology to inform education. I use a range of empirical research methods including laboratory behavioral tasks, neuroscience methods, and mathematical models. My research receives funding from the National Science Foundation. I teach courses in human cognition, judgment and decision making, concepts and categories, and statistics.
Prior to coming to Wesleyan, I served as a research fellow at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the Institut National de la Santé and de la Recherche Médicale in Paris, France. I earned a B.A. in Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences from Brown University and a Ph.D. in Psychology with a specialization in Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Michigan.
