Provost Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences
**Reviewing graduate applications for Fall 2026**
My research interests cover the simple cognitive mechanisms for search and decision making that exploit information structures in the environment to generate adaptive behavior, how such mechanisms evolve, and the ways in which evolution, cognition, and other adaptive processes (including learning and culture) can interact with each other. Research projects currently underway include studies of foraging in mind (searching for information in memory, in humans and AIs and collaborations between the two), human cooperation and attitudes toward humanity’s future (and ways to impact those attitudes), sequential choice and search (including the search for resources of various types), and simple heuristics for decision making and how they can be learned. I explore questions in these areas primarily by experiments to uncover cognitive mechanisms, and modeling empirical results with individual-based simulations of adaptive agents behaving in structured environments (whose structure in turn can be affected by the agents' own behavior).
Lundin, N.B., Brown, J.W., Johns, B.T., Jones, M.N., Purcell, J.R., Hetrick, W.P., O’Donnell, B.F., and Todd, P.M. (2023). Neural evidence of switch processes during semantic and phonetic foraging in human memory. Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, 120(42).
Todd, P.M., & Hills, T.T. (2020). Foraging in mind. Current Directions in Psychological Science.
Hills, T.T., Todd, P.M., Lazer, D., Redish, A.D., Couzin, I.D., and the Cognitive Search Research Group (2015). Exploration versus exploitation in space, mind, and society. Trends in Cognitive Science, 19(1), 46-54.
Todd, P.M., Hills, T.T., and Robbins, T.W. (Eds.) (2012). Cognitive search: Evolution, algorithms, and the brain. (Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 9.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hills, T.T., Jones, M.N., and Todd, P.M. (2012). Optimal foraging in semantic memory. Psychological Review, 119(2), 431-440.
Scheibehenne, B., Greifeneder, R., and Todd, P.M. (2010). Can there ever be too many options? A meta-analytic review of choice overload. Journal of Consumer Research, 37, 409-425.
Place, S.S., Todd, P.M., Penke, L., and Asendorpf, J.B. (2010). Humans show mate copying after observing real mate choices. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31, 320-325.
Todd, P.M., Penke, L., Fasolo, B., and Lenton, A.P. (2007). Different cognitive processes underlie human mate choices and mate preferences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(38), 15011-15016.
Todd, P.M., and Gigerenzer, G. (2007). Environments that make us smart: Ecological rationality. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16(3), 167-171.
Gigerenzer, G., Todd, P.M., and the ABC Research Group (1999). Simple heuristics that make us smart. New York: Oxford University Press.
Miller, G.F., and Todd, P.M. (1998). Mate choice turns cognitive. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2, 190-198.
Todd, P.M. (1989). A connectionist approach to algorithmic composition. Computer Music Journal, 13(4), 27-43.
Todd, P.M., and Loy, D.G. (Eds.) (1991). Music and connectionism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Miller, G.F., Todd, P.M., and Hegde, S.U. (1989). Designing neural networks using genetic algorithms. In J.D. Schaffer (Ed.), Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Genetic Algorithms (pp. 379-384). San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.
The College of Arts