Research Interests

My current research focus is on how to improve inference in psychological science to resolve the theory crisis. To that aim I develop mechanistic models that specify theoretical assumptions about how psychological processes produce behavior. So far I have done that mostly in my own field of human memory to understand how limited cognitive resources affect memory strength, but I am eager to extend such approaches to other non-cognitive phenomena. To strengthen the evaluation of theoretical models, I develop techniques for improving psychological measurement and new standards for model evaluation. To make measurement models accessible for everyone, I develop flexible and easy to use hierarchical Bayesian implementations in R. I am committed to open science, and I am strong advocate for Bayesian inference.

• Several goals drive my research program, including:
• developing comprehensive computational models of human memory
• understanding how people control limited cognitive resources
• developing and evaluating new methods for measuring cognitive processes
• developing new methods and tools for computational modeling of behavior
• applying computational modeling in non-cognitive areas of psychology
• measuring theoretical knowledge accumulation in psychology
• addressing the theory crisis in psychology