Everyone you know has a mind, but almost nobody knows how it works. You would never let someone build a bridge without learning physics or practice medicine without learning biology. Yet, we allow people to think for a living without knowing how their minds work.

Dr. Art Markman at the University of Texas at Austin investigates activities that people perform on a regular basis including generating new ideas, deciding where to eat for lunch, and how they communicate with other people.  As a cognitive scientist, he explores a variety of different disciplines, from biology to artificial intelligence, to help us understand what the mind may be doing. To validate his theories, Dr. Markman develops experiments that predict the way that people will act and respond in various situations.  Using data from those experiments, Dr. Markman can assess whether his theories provide a good explanation for human behavior.

• Dr. Markman has examined the way people make decisions and how those decisions are influenced by the goals people pursue.

• He is interested in the way people decide whether to explore new opportunities in the world or to stick with what has worked for them in the past.

• Dr. Markman explores the way people form and use categories, and how those categories affect the way people make predictions about what will happen in the future.

• Additionally, Dr. Markman examines the way motivation affects thinking. For instance, people are motivated to approach positive outcomes and to avoid negative outcomes. Thus, Dr. Markman examines how this tendency influences the way people reason and make decisions.

Dr. Markman is highly dedicated to helping the public understand the benefits of research in behavioral sciences.  Dr. Markman communicates the results of his research, and the results of research conducted by behavioral scientists across the globe to the public. He blogs regularly for venues like Psychology Today and Fast Company. He also has a radio show called, "Two Guys on Your Head."  According to Dr. Markman, studies in his lab are ongoing and research is never completed - "We are always in the process of writing up completed studies for publications and taking what we have learned to design and run new studies." At this moment, he is exploring how criminal investigators use their knowledge of crimes to make decisions about leads to pursue in investigations