Research Interests
My research
interests span a diverse set of topics in cognitive science such as episodic
and semantic memory, dynamic decision making, causal reasoning, and wisdom
of crowds. In each
of these areas, I combine mathematical and computational modeling with
behavioral experiments. The models and experiments are tightly coupled: I
try to formulate empirical questions with the goals of constraining,
developing, or testing between alternative computational models of how
people learn, process, and represent information. My research interests also
include some computer science topics in the domain of statistical machine
learning and information retrieval. The adoption of recent machine learning
methodology is useful in advancing cognitive science research, especially in
the area of semantic memory.
In our MadLab laboratory, we apply formal modeling
techniques to better understand the underlying processes when people
make decisions and retrieve information from memory.

Representative papers
 |
Turner,
B.M., Forstmann, B.U., Wagenmakers, E.J., Brown, S.D., Sederberg,
P.B., and Steyvers, M. (in press).
A Bayesian framework for
simultaneously modeling neural and behavioral data.
NeuroImage.
|
 |
Lee, M.D., Steyvers, M., de Young, M., & Miller. B.J. (2012).
Inferring expertise in knowledge and prediction ranking tasks.
Topics in Cognitive Science, 4, 151-163.
|
 |
Steyvers, M. & Hemmer, P. (2012).
Reconstruction from Memory in
Naturalistic Environments. In Brian H. Ross (Ed.) The Psychology
of Learning and Motivation, Vol 56. Elsevier Publishing, pp.
126-144.
|
 |
Yi, S.K.M., Steyvers, M., & Lee, M.D. (2012).
The Wisdom of
Crowds in Combinatorial Problems.
Cognitive Science, 36(3), 452-470.
|
 |
Rubin, T., Chambers, A., Smyth, P., & Steyvers, M. (2012).
Statistical Topic Models for Multi-Label Document Classification.
Journal of Machine Learning, 88(1), 157-208.
|
 |
Hemmer,
P. & Steyvers, M. (2009).
A Bayesian Account of Reconstructive
Memory. Topics in Cognitive Science, 1, 189-202.
|
 |
Brown, S.D., & Steyvers, M. (2009).
Detecting and Predicting
Changes. Cognitive Psychology, 58, 49-67.
|
 |
Griffiths,
T.L., Steyvers, M., & Tenenbaum, J.B.T. (2007).
Topics in
Semantic Representation. Psychological Review, 114(2),
211-244.
|
|