Forschungsinteressen / 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