Jennifer Sue Trueblood
Ruth N. Halls Professor - 2022
Jennifer Trueblood received her bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. from Indiana University (IU). She received her Ph.D. in 2012 in cognitive science under the mentorship of Distinguished Provost Professor Jerome Busemeyer. She returned to IU in 2022 to begin her teaching career at the university as the Ruth N. Halls Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Cognitive Science Program.
Prior to joining the IU faculty, she was faculty in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine from 2012-2015 and the Department of Psychology at Vanderbilt University from 2015-2022. She spent the 2018-2019 academic year as a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business
Professor Trueblood’s research takes a joint experimental and computational modeling approach to study human judgment, decision-making, and reasoning. She studies how people make decisions when faced with multiple, complex alternatives and options involving different risks and rewards. 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. She also combines machine learning techniques with cognitive models to study naturalistic human decision-making. Research topics include understanding (1) how context affects multialternative, multiattribute choice, (2) how dynamically changing information impacts decision processes, and (3) how physicians make decisions from medical images.
Her research contributions in decision-making, psychology, and computational modeling have been recognized by the William K. Estes Early Career Award from the Society for Mathematical Psychology, the Early Career Award from the Psychonomic Society, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship for early-career researchers, the Early Investigator Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Janet Taylor Spence Award from the Association for Psychological Science. Professor Trueblood is also a past president of the Society for Mathematical Psychology.