David Sewell
Dr David Sewell is a lecturer in experimental psychology at the UQ School of Psychology. His research area is cognitive psychology, where he focusses on the basic science of relating attention, learning, memory, and decision-making.
Much of his work involves developing and testing formal mathematical models of these basic cognitive processes and the ways they interact. The goal is to produce robust and integrative theoretical accounts of choice behaviour that provide new insights into the factors that influence how people make decisions.
Current research
- Developing formal cognitive models that combine theories of associative learning with theories of decision-making.
- Identifying cognitive costs involved in switching between different task contexts or different sources of information in memory.
Career highlights
- Development of a theory that explains how elements in visual display compete for access into memory and how this competition influences decision-making.
- Using formal modeling approaches to characterise capacity limits in visual working memory.
- Development of a theoretical framework that explains how associative learning principles support changes in decision-making in simple learning environments.
