Trueblood_Oct2022Dr. Jennifer Trueblood is the Ruth N. Halls Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Cognitive Science Program and Director of the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University. She is interested in understanding (1) how people make decisions when faced with multiple alternatives, (2) how dynamically changing information affects decision processes, (3) how people reason about complex causal events, and (4) how different perspectives, contexts, and frames can lead to interference effects in decision-making and memory. To address these questions, she develops probabilistic and dynamic models that can explain behavior and uses hierarchical Bayesian methods for data analysis and model-based inference. Her research has been recognized by numerous awards, including the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences. She is currently an Associate Editor at Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications. She is a past president of the Society for Mathematical Psychology and current president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making. She also helps advise the Women of Mathematical Psychology group.

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Current Members

hoyoung-doh-750x750pxHoyoung Doh (Graduate Student) is a third-year Ph.D. student in Psychology at Indiana University. He obtained his B.A. and M.A. in psychology from Seoul National University, South Korea. He is mainly interested in studying situations where people appear to make irrational or biased decisions. During his master’s, he studied the role of instinctive Pavlovian responses on people’s decisions during instrumental learning. He now aims to expand his research area, examining how changes in context influence decision-making and its connection to cognitive processes such as attention and memory.

profile_pictureGunnar Epping (Graduate Student) is a sixth-year Ph.D. student in Psychology and Cognitive Science at Indiana University working with Drs. Jerome Busemeyer and Jennifer Trueblood. He received his B.A. in physics from UC Santa Barbara in 2020. His current research projects include developing quantum models of human similarity judgments and decision making, designing algorithms to simulate and perform parameter optimization of cognitive models on quantum computers, and using both natural language processing and machine learning to study how language representations are mobilized in decision making.

0J8A7820Phillip Hegeman (Graduate Student) is a third-year Ph.D. student in Psychology and Cognitive Science at Indiana University. His interests include understanding higher-level cognitive processes such as decision making, reasoning, and the formation and updating of beliefs, both at the individual and collective levels (e.g., wisdom of the crowd, within social network structures). He earned B.S. degrees in mathematics and physics from the University of Missouri – Columbia in 2020, followed by a postbaccalaureate research fellowship at the National Institute on Minority Health & Health Disparities.

Sophia Priatka (Graduate Student) is a first-year Ph.D. student in Psychology at Indiana University. Her current interests center on cognitive processes, including judgment and decision-making, social cognition, and perception as a tool to better understand human behavior. She aims to apply these concepts to dynamic real-world settings like healthcare and policy. Sophia received a Bachelor of Science in Psychological Sciences and a Bachelor of Arts in Law and Society from Purdue University in 2025.

Mackenzie Siesel (Graduate Student) is a first-year Ph.D. student in Psychology and Cognitive Science at Indiana University. She received my B.S. in Neuroscience from The Ohio State University in 2023, followed by a postbaccalaureate research position at The Ohio State University, where she studied optimal visual search/foraging strategies. She is interested in using cognitive modeling and machine learning to observe the factors and higher-level processes involved in both human and machine decision making/cognition at both collective and individual levels.

Lab Alumni

Graduate Students and Postdocs

  • Eeshan Hasan (Postdoctoral Fellow, The Ohio State University), Ph.D. 2025 from IU
  • William Hayes (Assistant Professor, Binghamton University), Postdoctoral Fellow at IU 2022-2023
  • Yanjun Liu (Postdoctoral Fellow, UNSW in Australia), Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt and IU 2020-2023
  • Adam Ramsey, M.S. 2022 at Vanderbilt
  • Kyndra Cleveland, Academic Pathways Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt 2017-2019
  • Nathan Evans (ARC DECRA Research Fellow at The University of Queensland), postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt 2017-2018
  • Lisa Guo (Naval Information Warfare Center), Ph.D. 2017 at UCI
  • Percy Mistry (Research Scholar at Stanford), Ph.D. 2018 at UCI
  • James Yearsley (Lecturer in Psychology at City University London), postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt 2015-2017
  • Siyuan Yin (Ph.D. student at Wharton), M.S. 2017 at Vanderbilt

Undergraduate Students

  • Aneesha Dasari
  • Alexandra Cuc
  • 
Lin Fei (Applied Scientist at Uber)
  • Grace Huang
  • 
Kevin Jin
  • Catherine Kim (Amazon Robotics)
  • 
Paul Kim
  • Ke Lai (Ph.D. student at Duke)
  • Andrea Liberman (Associate Consultant at Bain & Company)
  • Yun-Jang (Ignatius) Liu
  • Payton O’Daniels (Implementation Consultant at Fast Enterprises, LLC)
  • Jared Ohlund
  • 
Megan Woodruff (Technical Product Manager at Intentional Futures)
  • 
Mingqian Wu
  • 
Daier Yun
  • Reena Zhang