Dr. Alan Jern teaches psychology, including new courses in social and computational psychology. He is a cognitive scientist and uses computational models and behavioral experiments to study how people think and reason. Dr. Jern's research interests include how people think about other people, how people learn and use concepts, and how people revise their beliefs after seeing new evidence. Check out his personal web page.
Academic Degrees
- BS, UCLA, 2007
- PhD, Carnegie Mellon University, 2013
Research Experiences
- How people understand and explain other people's behavior
- How people learn and use concepts
Select Publications & Presentations
- Jern. A., Derrow-Pinion, A., & Piergiovanni, AJ. (2021). A computational framework for understanding the roles of simplicity and rational support in people’s behavior explanations. Cognition, 210.
- Jern, A., Lucas, C. G., & Kemp, C., "People Learn Other People’s Preferences Through Inverse Decision-Making," Cognition, 168, 46-64, 2017
- Jern, A. and Kemp, C., “A Decision Network Account of Reasoning About Other People's Choices,” Cognition, 142, 12-38, 2015
- Jern, A., Chang, K. K., and Kemp, C., “Belief Polarization is Not Always Irrational,” Psychological Review, 121(2), 206-224, 2014
- Jern, A. and Kemp, C., “A Probabilistic Account of Exemplar and Category Generation,” Cognitive Psychology, 66(1), 85-125, 2013
Teaching Interests
- Cognitive psychology
- Social psychology
- Computational modeling