Deborah Lin

I am currently a PhD student in the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at The University of Melbourne, co-advised by A/Prof Daniel Little and Prof Philip Smith.

My research interests centre on using mathematical models of cognition to understand how people make decisions over time, what information is relevant to them in the decision making process, and how they might learn from their past experiences. For my PhD, I study this in the context of perceptual decision making, where participants have to choose between completing tasks that vary in reward and difficulty. The computational models I employ draw upon principles of reinforcement learning and sequential sampling, and aim to capture both choices and response times. A second ongoing project aims to explore how well people schedule tasks of varying difficulty, rewards, and deadlines within a limited time.

Prior to my PhD, I completed my BA with an Honours in Psychology at The University of Melbourne. My honours thesis examined how recent experience affects categorisation decisions with stimuli that have separable attributes. During my undergrad, I worked on developing an exemplar-based model for decisions from description with Prof Ben Newell and Dr. Chris Donkin.