Rudy Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences
(812) 855-9598
jtownsen@indiana.edu

Ph.D., Stanford, 1966

• Editor Emeritus, Journal of Mathematical Psychology
• Past member, Executive Board, Society for Mathematical Psychology
• Past president, Society for Mathematical Psychology
• Society for Experimental Psychologists

• Visiting Associate Professor Award, Mathematical Psychology Labs, Rockefeller University, 1972-1973
• Senior Scientist Fellowship, Braunschweig University, West Germany, awarded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 1976-1977
• Visiting Scholar Award, University of California at Irvine, 1981-1982
• Visiting Professorship Award, Stanford University, Winter and Spring, 1986
• James McKeen Cattell Sabbatical Award, 1992-1993
• American Council of Learned Societies and DAAD German-American Collaborative Research Award, 1992-1993
• Winner, Society for Computers in Psychology/Erlbaum Distinguished Presentation Award, 1991
• Distinguished Scholar, School of Natural Sciences, California State University, Fresno, 1995

Interests include the development of general mathematical approaches to human information processing, cognitive psychology including visual pattern recognition, memory scanning, decision theory, and human factors.

Some specific research topics:

• Mathematical models and experimentation in pattern (e.g., letter) and face recognition, and visual display and memory search.
• Mathematical investigations of the testability of issues in information processing, such as parallel vs. serial processing.
• Human decision making from an approach based on psychologically oriented stochastic process theories.
• Dynamics and process models in clinical phenomena.

Townsend, J.T. & Ashby, F.G. (1983). The Stochastic Modeling of Elementary Psychological Processes.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Townsend, J.T. & Busemeyer, J.R. (1989). Approach-avoidance: Return to dynamic decision behavior.
In C. Izawa (Ed.), Current Issues in Cognitive Processes: The Tulance Floweree Symposium on Cognition (pp. 107-133). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Townsend, J.T. & Schweickert, R. (1989). Toward the trichotomy method of reaction times: Laying the foundation of stochastic mental networks.
Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 33, 309-327.

Townsend, J.T. (1990). Serial vs. parallel processing: Sometimes they look like Tweedledum and Tweedledee but they can (and should) be distinguished.
Psychological Science, 1, 46-54.

Townsend, J. T. & Nozawa, G. (in press). Serial exhaustive models can violate the race model inequality: Implications for architecture and capacity.
Psychological Review.