James Tarlton Townsend is a Distinguished Rudy Professor of Psychology at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is known for his work in mathematical psychology, particularly in distinguishing parallel and serial processing and for models of perception.
Education and career Townsend received an A.B. in Psychology from Fresno State College in 1961. In 1962, he began his graduate work under Richard Atkinson at the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences at Stanford University. After completing his Ph.D. in psychology in 1966, Townsend joined the faculty at the Department of Psychology at the University of Hawaii. Two years later, in 1968, Townsend moved to Purdue University where he received tenure in 1971 and became a full professor in 1977. During that period, Townsend spent time as a visiting associate professor in William Kaye Estes’s lab at Rockefeller University (1972–1973), a visiting scholar at the Institut für Psychologie at the Technische Universität, Braunschweig, a visiting scholar in the School of Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine (1982), and as a visiting professor in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University (1986). In 1989, Townsend became a Rudy Professor in the Department of Psychology at Indiana University. Townsend became a Distinguished Professor in 2008.
Research Townsend's major theoretical contributions include Systems Factorial Technology,Townsend, J.T. & Nozawa, G. (1995). Spatio-temporal properties of elementary perception: An investigation of parallel, serial and coactive theories. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 39, 321-360. General Recognition TheoryAshby, F. G., & Townsend, J. T. (1986). Varieties of perceptual independence. Psychological Review, 93, 154-179. and Decision field theory.Busemeyer, J., & Townsend, J. T. (1993). Decision field theory: A dynamic-cognitive approach to decision making. Psychological Review, 100(3) pages 432-459.
Townsend coauthored an influential book on modeling in psychology with F. Gregory Ashby, The Stochastic Modeling of Elementary Psychological Processes.Townsend, J. T., & Ashby, F. G. (1983). The Stochastic Modeling of Elementary Psychological Processes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Link, S. (1986). Wogols, Turgles and Whimpf and Things. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, pages 85-90.(1984). Book Reviews. British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology, 37, 293-296.Diederich, A. (2010). Mathematical Psychology. In The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology. (Volume 3, pages 971-974). New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons. He has also edited multiple volumes on mathematical psychology.B. Berglund, J. T. Townsend, Rossi, G. B. & Pendrill, L. (Eds.), (2012). Measurement with Persons: Theory and Methods. New York: Taylor & Francis Group.Wenger, M. J., & Townsend, J. T. (2001). Computational, Geometric, and Process Issues in Facial Cognition: Progress and Challenges. Mahwah, New Jersey: Erlbaum.Geissler, H. G., Link, S., & Townsend, J. T. (1992). Cognition, Information Processing and Psychophysics: Basic Issues. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
In 1985 and again in 2004, Townsend served as the president of the Society for Mathematical Psychology and has more recently served as the president of the Configural Processing Consortium. He served as editor of the Journal of Mathematical Psychology from 1985 to 1989.
Awards Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Mathematical Psychology, 2020 Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, 2007 Fellow of the American Psychological Association, 2004 Fellow of the American Psychological Society, 1998
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