Department of
Psychological and Brain Sciences

On May 20 colleagues, students, professors, and mentors of PBS Distinguished Professor Jerome Busemeyer gathered on the IU Bloomington campus for a daylong celebration of his remarkable career.

Among the many talks and tributes, were those from his longtime PBS colleagues: Distinguished Professors James Townsend, Robert Nosofsky and Richard Shiffrin, as well as his more recent PBS colleague and former student Ruth N. Halls Professor Jennifer Trueblood. From Germany to South Korea to China, Australia and across the U.S., the participants represented numerous countries and continents. Some who couldn’t be there in person made memorable virtual tributes.

The talks conveyed the scope and influence of Busemeyer’s work, for example, as Trueblood noted, in the numerous iterations or “children” of Busemeyer’s original work with multi-alternative decision field theory.

There were some light-hearted recollections as well. For instance, from Young Ahn, a former student now teaching in South Korea who recalls an interaction with Busemeyer while he was a student: “I asked you how I should write a paper and you said, ‘Boom, boom, boom.’ What did you mean? I think you meant to say the sentences should be very well connected.”

Or from Peter Bruza, Busemeyer’s collaborator in the development of quantum cognition theory, hailing from the east coast of Australia with the roaring sound of the wind and waves around him: A glimpse at the underside of his surfboard showed a thank you note to “Jerome and Cambridge University Press.” Bruza had used the royalties from their book to buy the surfboard.

As Busemeyer reflects on this event, he says, “I would like to thank everyone who participated in this special celebration of my academic career. I especially want to thank the organizers. I am very grateful to the speakers, and I very much liked listening to all the presentations by my colleagues during the day. Your talks not only broadened my horizons and thinking, but also allowed me to enjoy the new academic exchanges. There were also lots of good laughs, good humor, and a pleasant mood throughout. Dinner with everyone in the evening generated a kind of open-hearted friendship flowing in my soul. All of this is enough to inspire me to unswervingly move towards the most brilliant late autumn station of my research career!”

“I am very grateful to my colleagues, collaborators and students,” he adds. “Go forward with me, share and exchange your research ideas and results, help to better understand and solve the problems we face, and thus guide the future research path. Thank you again for your support and help in my academic research career. My achievements are inseparable from your support and attention. I will always maintain my enthusiasm and efforts to make greater contributions to this field.”

One of the world’s leading researchers in the field of mathematical psychology, Busemeyer’s influential decision field theory is a model of decision making that describes the variability of human preferences and how these preferences evolve across time. More recently, his pioneering theoretical approach to decision making, quantum cognition, seeks to explain human decisions in accordance with the probability system of quantum theory rather than the “rational” principles of standard probability theory.

Busemeyer has received major awards and recognitions for his groundbreaking work, among them the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Basel, a Fellow designation from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Mathematical Psychology.