About me

I am a cognitive behavioural scientist with a PhD in Psychology from the University of Freiburg (Germany), which I have obtained in March 2014. My PhD supervisor was Christoph Klauer. Since July 2020, I am a lecturer at the Department of Experimental Psychology at UCL (UK). Before that, I was an assistant professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Warwick (UK) (October 2018 to June 2020). From October 2014 to September 2018 I was a postdoc in the lab of Klaus Oberauer (Univserity of Zurich, Switzerland). My main research interests are formal and computational approaches to human cognition, mainly in the areas of reasoning, decision making, and memory. I mostly use the statistical programming language R for which I have also programmed some packages. I think it is fair to say that I am some kind of R nerd.

An overarching goal of my research is to establish a closer connection between theories and data. I believe that psychology has more theories and theoretical constructs than justified by the available data. Especially for theories that are specified on a relatively abstract level or have a relatively broad scope, there is often little actual evidence for neither the abstract constructs nor the broad scope. Consequently, I like working with theories for which the connection of theoretical constructs to data is well established either via the specificity of theories, as is often found in the case of measurement models, or well replicated theories and phenomena. In the current replication debate I would consider myself a “replicator” and have already tried to directly replicate certain findings (e.g., my work on intuitive logic). I am convinced that before extending previous findings, a first step should be to replicate the original findings.

In line with my love for R, I also really like technically challenging work. Computational and applied statistics are constantly evolving fields with many interesting developments that are relevant to theoretical and methodological dicussions within psychology. Consequently, I try to follow these fields as much as I can and try to use interesting statistical developments for research in psychology and related disciplines. However, my ain interest is not methodological nature. I like new developments that can be used to answer interesting questions about the human mind and human behavior.

In terms of substantive topics, I have so far mostly been concerned with models of recognition memory and reasoning, but have also worked on smaller projects related to other topics (such as response time modeling or decision making). My topics page gives a good overview of the larger topics I have been working on. In my (cumulative) PhD I was interested in the role of normative accounts in theories of human reasoning. In my eyes, empirically adequate theories of reasoning should not contain strong normative elements. Cognitive processes in human reasoners have most likely not evolved to fulfill formal norms. Consequently, I am now interested in descriptive accounts of human reasoning as long as they are mathematically specified (i.e., formal or mathematical models). Thanks to David Kellen I have also been strongly invested in measurement models for (recognition) memory. My main interest right now in this domain is to more accurately measures recognition memory performance.

If you are interested in working with me or have questions regarding my work or think there is anything else to discuss, just send me an email.

 


 

Open source  and other community activities

Mailing lists I actively follow:

 

Code repositories:

  • I have a github account. New projects will most likely be hosted there. I like github.
  • Some of my older projects are hosted on R-forge.
  • Code snippets can also be found on my pastebin account.

 

Besides my own R packages, I have contributed code to some open source projects:

I am somewhat active on two Q&A sites: stats.stackexchange.com for statistics and stackoverflow.com for programming:  profile for Henrik on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites

I am member of the Society for Mathematical Psychology and a fellow of the Psychonomic Society.

 

Ad-hoc reviews:

  • Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS)
  • Cognition
  • Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
  • Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition
  • Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
  • Journal of Memory and Language
  • Behavior Research Methods
  • Cognitive Science
  • Experimental Psychology
  • Memory & Cognition
  • Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
  • Cognition and Emotion
  • Thinking & Reasoning
  • PloS ONE
  • Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA)
  • Journal of Cognitive Psychology
  • Frontiers in Psychology
  • Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
  • Frontiers in Psychology
  • Advances in Cognitive Psychology

 Reviewer grant agencies:

  • Swiss National Science Foundation