Decision-Making & Reasoning: Behavior, Modeling, and Machine Learning – Jab Talk

Sun 11.01 10:30 - 11:30

In the first part of the talk, I will present my work on decision-making and reasoning, usingexperiments paired with computational models to test competing psychological explanations.I will illustrate this line of research with a project examining how people combine privateevidence with social information when making risky decisions, and how modeling can helpreveal the mechanisms underlying the integration of these sources of evidence.In the second part of the talk, I will focus on theory validation in cognitive science. I willintroduce a framework that treats verbal reports as process-tracing data for validatingcomputational cognitive models. I will then present a tool my colleagues and I recentlydeveloped that automates the elicitation, transcription, and analysis of spoken reports usinglarge language models and other machine-learning methods, enabling scalable quantitativeanalyses of verbal data.I will close by outlining my current research agenda and how I envision my work developingin the future.
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Speaker

Tehila Mechera-Ostrovsky

Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich

Short Bio:I received my undergraduate degree in Psychology from the University of Basel, Switzerland,and completed my PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of New South Wales inSydney, Australia. My doctoral research used cognitive modeling to study human problem-solving and decision-making, integrating verbal-report data with large language models. I amcurrently a senior research scientist at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany,where I continue investigating how to validate computational cognitive models usingmachine-learning methods and related approaches.