Florian I. Seitz

Hi, I’m a PhD student at the Center for Economic Psychology at the University of Basel with a focus on cognitive science. My research focuses on the cognitive processes underlying core human behaviors. In particular, I’m interested in the field of psychological similarity and how similarity affects human inferences such as categorizations. Typically, people assign similar objects to the same category and dissimilar objects to different categories. My research investigates how the human mind computes the similarity between objects in such category inference tasks. In pursuing this research aim, I take a rigorous experimental approach that combines experimental design optimization,inferential statistics, andcomputational cognitive modeling (for an example, see Seitz, Jarecki, & Rieskamp, 2021). I also have a keen interest in related methodologies from statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (e.g., multidimensional scaling and neural networks) and how they can be combined with computational modelling to make a comprehensive picture of human cognition.
 

Publications

Seitz, F. I., Jarecki, J. B., & Rieskamp, J. (2021). People are Insensitive to Within-Category Feature Correlations in Categorization. In T. C. Stewart (Ed.), Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Cognitive Modelling (pp. 255-256). University Park, PA: Applied Cognitive Science Lab, Penn State.

Steiner, M. D., Seitz, F. I., & Frey, R. (2021). Through the window of my mind: Mapping information integration and the cognitive representations underlying self-reported risk preference. Decision, 8(2), 97-122.   

Jarecki, J., Hoffmann, J. A., Giese, H., & Seitz, F. I. (2021). Similarity-based Influences in Judgment and Decision Making. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 43, 41-43.   

Jarecki, J. B., & Seitz, F. I. (2020). Cognitivemodels: An R Package for Formal Cognitive Modeling. In T. C. Stewart (Ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Cognitive Modelling (pp. 100-106). University Park, PA: Applied Cognitive Science Lab, Penn State.

 

Courses

• Supervision of Bachelor (BA) Theses

Ongoing topics

• Understanding the role of similarity and rules in human inferences and preferences:  People habitually make cognitive inferences and state their preferences. For instance, people can readily classify an apple as fruit, estimate its price, and tell how much they like apples. To perform such inference and preference tasks, people may make use of similar past experiences or of rules that specify the link between objects and decision variables. The Center for Economic Psychology aims to understand how people use and combine similar past experiences and rules to understand the world that surrounds them.

Ongoing projects

• doc.CH project “New approaches to cognition: Developing and testing a multifaceted view on similarity”, grant given to Florian I. Seitz, project lasting from 01.09.2020-31.08.2024, https://forschdb2.unibas.ch/inf2/rm_projects/object_view.php?r=4600074
• Representative publications
• Preprint for the manuscript: Identifying Similarity- and Rule-Based Processes in Quantitative Judgments: A Multi-Method Approach Combining Cognitive Modeling and Eye Tracking (Seitz, Albrecht, von Helversen, Rieskamp, & Rosner, paper under review)

Teaching

• BA lectures
• Msc/PhD lectures