2 minute read
David Illingworth
from Aspire 2022
by CSULB-CLA
DR. DAVID ILLINGWORTH, newly hired as an assistant professor of psychology, brings his expertise in judgment and decision-making to CSULB. His research counters the notion that people have certain “hard grain rules in their minds.”
“I take an alternative approach and assume that the only heuristic you need to postulate, to understand, people’s judgments, their choices, their decisions, is memory,” Dr. Illingworth says. By focusing on how memory operates, he says, he is able to understand how people formulate beliefs and expectations.
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For the past three years, Dr. Illingworth, who got his Ph.D. at Georgia Tech in 2020, worked as a postdoctoral researcher. He conducts his research through computer-based experimentation.
Dr. Illingworth became interested in studying cognition as a biology major at UC Merced. After he took his first psychology course, he became more interested in the complexities of behavior and saw the connections between the two fields.
“I’ve found myself in an area where we draw a lot of inspiration from theories of animal behavior,” Dr. Illingworth says. “Like how an individual forages their mind for the memories that are most relevant to what they’re thinking about at any given moment. It’s very similar to how any number of animals go foraging for food in highly complex environments.”
The pandemic allowed Dr. Illingworth to focus on and finish manuscripts he’d been working on. The publication he is most proud of, “Strength of Belief Guides Information Foraging,” was published in Psychological Science.
Dr. Illingworth calls his start at CSULB “close to a homecoming,” as he’s originally from Alhambra. Since then, he’s lived in Oklahoma, Georgia, and Maryland. Dr. Illingworth is excited to expose students to a style of psychology they may not be familiar with, as well as to eat Southern California-style Mexican food, which he says is unbeatable.
“I feel like I’ve been waiting a long time for this opportunity,” he says. “Cal State Long Beach is exactly the kind of place I need to be for this next step.”
