Robert (Bob) Wilson

Associate Professor of Psychology

Education

Ph.D. in Bioengineering, University of Pennsylvania, 2009

Research Interests

Computational Cognitive Neuroscience, Reinforcement Learning, Decision Making, Computational Psychiatry, Computational Aging

About

The goal of my research is to build mathematical theories of the mind and brain that explain behavior in health, mental illness, and cognitive decline. To this end, work in my lab mixes computational modeling with behavioral, neuroimaging, and neurostimulation experiments to probe the algorithms underlying human behavior.

Our work touches on many different kinds of behavior including:

• Explore-exploit decision making
• Phishing email detection
• Navigation
• Perceptual decision making

Selected Publications

Wilson, R. C., Bonawitz, E., Costa, V. D., & Ebitz, R. B. (2021). Balancing exploration and exploitation with information and randomization. Current opinion in behavioral sciences, 38, 49-56.

Hakim, Z. M., Ebner, N. C., Oliveira, D. S., Getz, S. J., Levin, B. E., Lin, T., ... & Wilson, R. C. (2021). The Phishing Email Suspicion Test (PEST) a lab-based task for evaluating the cognitive mechanisms of phishing detection. Behavior research methods, 53, 1342-1352.

Keung, W., Hagen, T. A., & Wilson, R. C. (2020). A divisive model of evidence accumulation explains uneven weighting of evidence over time. Nature Communications, 11(1), 2160.

Wilson, R. C., & Collins, A. G. (2019). Ten simple rules for the computational modeling of behavioral data. Elife, 8, e49547.

Wilson, R. C., Shenhav, A., Straccia, M., & Cohen, J. D. (2019). The eighty five percent rule for optimal learning. Nature communications, 10(1), 4646.