Jared Hotaling

Jared Hotaling is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology within the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He leads the Cognitive Decision Making Lab and maintains additional affiliations across disciplines connecting psychology with economics, management, and AI research. His academic journey began with a Ph.D. from Indiana University, establishing the foundation for his specialized work in cognitive approaches to decision science.

• Ph.D., Indiana University

Hotaling's research examines how people make decisions in complex scenarios requiring information search, learning from experience, and future planning. His cognitive perspective explains decision processes through psychological constructs including attention, perception, learning, and memory. Using behavioral experiments combined with computational modeling, he develops and tests theories that bridge traditional domains including Psychology, Economics, Marketing, Management, Game Design, AI, and Public Policy. His work particularly focuses on cognitive modeling of dynamic decisions, decisions from experience, and attention mechanisms in risky choice.

Analysis of Hotaling's recent publications reveals a consistent focus on cognitive modeling approaches to decision making. His research shows increasing sophistication in modeling multistage decision processes, with particular attention to how people handle uncertainty, learn from experience, and balance procedural versus outcome utility. The work demonstrates strong interdisciplinary connections between cognitive psychology and behavioral economics, with growing applications to neuroscience methods.

Hotaling has received notable recognition in his field, including:

• Bruno de Finetti Prize, European Association for Decision Making (2015)

He teaches key courses including Decisions & Judgments, Computational Cognitive Modeling, and Learning & Decision Making, training the next generation of decision scientists. His Cognitive Decision Making Lab serves as the primary research hub where he and his team investigate complex choice scenarios through both empirical research and computational modeling approaches. Current work focuses on extending cognitive models to account for dynamic, multistage decisions and understanding how attention mechanisms modulate risky choice behavior.