David Bosch

My work explores how we organize (and reorganize) information—sights and sounds, words and pictures, thoughts and feelings—into representations of the world around us. One line of research looks at factors that influence structuring of spatial information and how they can inform our representation of the environment, both physical and social. Another investigates the effects of cognitive structuring principles on the formation and use of categories, including the role of negative evidence in making inferences. For example, if we play a new slot machine game at the casino and win money when an apple appears but don’t when a carrot, a bean, or broccoli show up, we might start to believe that all fruits will bring in cash, even though we’ve only seen a single winning apple. Other work uses this approach to address issues that have immediate practical applications for public policy and consumer insights, such as a recent publication applying structural equation modeling to understand why most people say donating organs is the right thing to do but only a minority actually sign their donor cards.