Background

David is a doctoral student in the Cognition program working with Howard Nusbaum. He studied mathematics at the University of Chicago and loved it so much he returned for his PhD in Psychology.

Research Interests

David is interested in how humans transform raw information into concrete concepts and categories, and especially how we decide what counts as signal and what counts as noise. He is exploring this in the context of hallucinations and delusions, which offer extremal cases of information processing. By studying how the mind sometimes mistakes noise for signal or builds categories out of distorted input (or perhaps just processes information differently), he hopes to better understand the ordinary ways we make sense of the world.