Peter Todd
Professor of Informatics
- Phone
- (812) 855-3914
- Office
- Psychology Building, Room 369
Informatics East, Room 302 - Web Site
- www.cogs.indiana.edu/pmtodd.html
Other Titles
- Professor of Cognitive Science
- Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Research Interests
Adaptive behavior (how agents create and adapt to environment structures), decision making (simple heuristics that operate with bounded information and computation), search (how organisms explore and exploit different resources, including information), evolutionary psychology (mate choice, food choice)
Biography
Peter M. Todd grew up in Silicon Valley, studied mathematics and electronic music at Oberlin College, received an MPhil in computer speech and language processing from Cambridge University, and developed neural network models of the evolution of learning for his 1992 PhD in psychology at Stanford University with advisor David Rumelhart. In 1995 he moved to Germany to help found the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC) with director Gerd Gigerenzer; the Center has been at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin since 1997. Todd's research interests while assistant director there focused on modeling the interactions between decision making and decision environments, including how the two co-evolve over time. The Center's work culminated in the book Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (Gigerenzer, Todd, and the ABC Research Group; Oxford, 1999); the sequel, focusing on environment structures and their impact, is being finalized. Todd moved to IU Bloomington in 2005, where he established the ABC-West research lab. His work has been published in journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Science, Animal Behaviour, Appetite, Marketing Theory, and Artificial Life, and has been publicized on BBC News, CNN.com, New Scientist, and many other outlets. In addition, Todd has coedited three books on neural network and artificial life models in music and has written papers on topics ranging from social decision processes in rats to modeling patterns of age at first marriage.
