Research Interests
- Decision Making
- Planning & Strategic Thinking
- Information Integration
- Cognitive Modeling
- Behavioral Economics
Research Description
I study how people make decisions. I am particularly interested in complex choice scenarios, where people must, for example, search for information, learn from experience, or plan for the future. Much of my work takes a cognitive perspective, with the goal of explaining the decision process in terms of psychological constructs such as attention, perception, learning, and memory.
Through a combination of behavioral experiments and computational modeling, I develop and test new theories of decision making. I mathematically formalize these theories as computational models that I compare and select according to various methods. In doing so, my work links traditional research domains in Psychology, Economics, Marketing, Management, Game Design, AI, and Public Policy.
I am planning to admit graduate students as a primary research advisor for the Fall 2022.
If you are interested in being an undergraduate research assistant in my lab, please fill out an online application.
Education
Ph.D., Indiana University
Awards and Honors
Bruno de Finetti Prize, European Association for Decision Making (2015)
Courses Taught
Decisions & Judgments
Learning & Decision Making
Heuristic Strategies in Judgment & Decision Making
Highlighted Publications
Hotaling, J. M. (2020). Decision field theory-planning: A cognitive model of planning on the fly in multistage decision making. Decision, 7(1), 20-42. https://doi.org/10.1037/dec0000113
Vanunu, Y., Hotaling, J. M., & Newell, B. R. (2020). Elucidating the differential impact of extreme-outcomes in perceptual and preferential choice. Cognitive Psychology, 119, [101274]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2020.101274
Hotaling, J. M., Jarvstad, A., Donkin, C., & Newell, B. R. (2019). How to Change the Weight of Rare Events in Decisions From Experience. Psychological Science, 30(12), 1767-1779. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619884324
Spektor, M. S., Kellen, D., & Hotaling, J. M. (2018). When the Good Looks Bad: An Experimental Exploration of the Repulsion Effect. Psychological Science, 29(8), 1309-1320. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618779041
Gluth, S., Hotaling, J. M., & Rieskamp, J. (2017). The attraction effect modulates reward prediction errors and intertemporal choices. Journal of Neuroscience, 37(2), 371-382. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2532-16.2016
Recent Publications
Hotaling, J. M., Navarro, D. J., & Newell, B. R. (2021). Skilled Bandits: Learning to Choose in a Reactive World. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 47(6), 879-905. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000981
Vanunu, Y., Hotaling, J. M., Le Pelley, M. E., & Newell, B. R. (2021). How top-down and bottom-up attention modulate risky choice. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118(39), [e2025646118]. https://doi.org/10.1073/PNAS.2025646118
Decaro, D. A., Decaro, M. S., Hotaling, J. M., & Johnson, J. G. (2020). Procedural and economic utilities in consequentialist choice: Trading freedom of choice to minimize financial losses. Judgment and Decision Making, 15(4), 517-533.
Hotaling, J. M. (2020). Decision field theory-planning: A cognitive model of planning on the fly in multistage decision making. Decision, 7(1), 20-42. https://doi.org/10.1037/dec0000113
Hotaling, J. M., Donkin, C., Jarvstad, A., & Newell, B. R. (2020, Aug 3). MEM-EX: An exemplar memory model of decisions from experience. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/fjhr9