Distinguished Professor and Chancellor's Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences
Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
**Not accepting graduate students for Fall 2027**
Dr. Nosofsky’s research involves computational modeling of human category representation and relations between categorization and memory. He is best known for his development and testing of the generalized context model (GCM), which a major review article characterized as one of the most influential formal models in all of psychology. The GCM formalizes the idea that people represent categories by storing individual examples of the categories in memory and classify objects based on their similarity to the stored examples. Nosofsky also pioneered the rigorous application of similarity-scaling techniques in combination with the formal model to allow for quantitative prediction of classification performance at the level of individual items. Important extensions of the model allow it to account for the time course of categorization decision making. Because of its individual-example-storage assumption, the GCM and its extensions also provide a unified account of relations between categorization and old-new recognition memory. In current work, Nosofsky has been scaling up the application of the model to real-world natural category domains; combining use of human-judgment and machine-based methods for deriving high-dimensional similarity spaces for the objects under study; using the model to account for the memorability of real-world visual images; and applying the model to help guide the search for effective procedures for teaching science categories.
2026 - Orr, O. R. P., Wasserman, E. A., & Nosofsky, R. M. (2026). A psychological-scaling approach to unraveling the nature of pigeons’ categorization of natural visual objects. Psychological Review.
2025 - Nosofsky, R. M., Ehinger, K. A., & Osth, A. F. (2025). Tests of a hybrid-similarity exemplar model of context-dependent memorability in a high-dimensional real-world category domain. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
2023 - Meagher, B. J., & Nosofsky, R. M. (2023). Testing formal cognitive models of classification and old-new recognition in a real-world high-dimensional category domain. Cognitive Psychology, 145: 101596.
2020 - Sanders, C. A., & Nosofsky, R. M. Training deep networks to construct a psychological feature space for a natural-object category domain. Computational Brain & Behavior, 3, 229-251.
2012 - Nosofsky, R.M., Little, D.R., & James, T.W. Activation in the neural network responsible for categorization and recognition reflects parameter changes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109, 333-338.
2011 - Nosofsky, R.M., Little, D.R., Donkin, C., & Fific, M. Short-term memory scanning viewed as exemplar-based categorization. Psychological Review, 118, 280-315.
1997 - Nosofsky, R.M., & Palmeri, T.J. An exemplar-based random-walk model of speeded classification. Psychological Review, 104, 266-300.
The College of Arts