Joachim Vandekerckhove

•Professor and Chancellor's Fellow, Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine

•Affiliated Faculty, Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of California, Irvine

Biography

Joachim Vandekerckhove, Ph.D., is Professor and Chancellor's Fellow in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, where he is also Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science and the Department of Statistics. His research centers on computational modeling of cognition and Bayesian statistics, with particular focus on stochastic process models, cognitive psychometrics, and individual differences. He received his Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology and Psychometrics from the University of Leuven, Belgium.

Vandekerckhove has secured extramural funding as Principal Investigator from the National Science Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation, supporting work on topics ranging from neurocognitive modeling to Bayesian methods for meta-analysis. He has served as Standing Conference Chair and Executive Board Member of the Society for Mathematical Psychology, and in 2024 served as Guest Editor of a special feature on the practice of science in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a Fellow of the Psychonomic Society and a Senior Fellow at Army Combat Capabilities Development Command.

Vandekerckhove received the Society for Mathematical Psychology's William K. Estes Early Career Award in 2014. His research has been covered in media outlets including the New York Times, National Public Radio, WIRED Magazine, and Nature News. He has been a lecturer and co-organizer of the biennial Computational Cognitive Modeling summer school since 2010, and has developed open-source software tools for fitting and estimating cognitive models that are used by researchers across the field.

Education

PhD in Quantitative Psychology and Psychometrics, University of Leuven, Belgium, 2009
Master in Psychology (Licentiate), University of Leuven, Belgium, 2005
Bachelor in Psychology (Candidate), University of Leuven, Belgium, 2002

Distinctions

Senior Fellow at Army Combat Capabilities Development Command
Fellow of the Psychonomic Society
Best Poster Award at MathPsych/ICCM, 2025
Best Poster Award at MathPsych/ICCM, 2024
Best Poster Award at MathPsych/ICCM/EMPG, 2023
People's Choice Award for Best Talk Virtual MathPsych, 2022
UC Irvine School of Social Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award, 2015, 2020
UC Irvine Social Science Assistant Professor Research Award, 2016
William K. Estes Early Career Award, Society for Mathematical Psychology, 2014

Areas of Expertise

Computational Cognitive Modeling
Drift Diffusion Decision Processes
Metascience
Publication Bias Mitigation
Hierarchical Bayesian Inference
Neurocognitive Latent Variables
Cognitive Decline Phenotyping
Cyber Resilience Quantification
Bayesian Inference

Recent Publications

Chavez De la Pena A.F., Shin E., Vandekerckhove J., “Robust Bayesian hypothesis testing with the hierarchical EZ-DDM” (opens in new tab), Behavior Research Methods, vol. 58, 2026.
Alcalay R., Vandekerckhove J., “Epistemic Disadvantage in Open Science Practices” (opens in new tab), Social Epistemology, vol. 40, pp. 599-615, 2026.
Medriano K., Vandekerckhove J., “A Reconstruct-then-Bootstrap Test for the Sufficiency of Diffusion Processes” (opens in new tab), Computational Brain and Behavior, 2026.
Weisman, M. J., Kott, A., Ellis, J. E., Murphy, B. J., Parker, T. W., Smith, S., Vandekerckhove, J., “Quantitative measurement of cyber resilience: modeling and experimentation” (opens in new tab), ACM Transactions on Cyber Physical Systems, vol. 9, pp. 1-25, 2025.
Oravecz, Z., Vandekerckhove, J., Hakun, J., Kim, S., Katz, M., Wang, C., Lipton, R. B., Derby, C. A., Roque, N. A., Sliwinski, M., “Computational phenotyping of cognitive decline with retest learning” (opens in new tab), The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, vol. 80, pp. gbaf030, 2025.
Shiffrin, R. M., Trueblood, J., Kellen, D., Vandekerckhove, J., “Dialogues about the practice of science” (opens in new tab), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 122, pp. e2423782122, 2025.
Vo, K., Sun, J. Q., Nunez, M. D., Vandekerckhove, J., Srinivasan, R., “Deep latent variable joint cognitive modeling of neural signals and human behavior” (opens in new tab), NeuroImage, vol. 291, pp. 120559, 2024.
Montgomery, L. E., Baldini, C. M., Vandekerckhove, J., Lee, M. D., “Where's Waldo, Ohio? Using cognitive models to improve the aggregation of spatial knowledge” (opens in new tab), Computational Brain and Behavior, vol. 7, pp. 242-254, 2024.
Nunez, M. D., Fernandez, K., Srinivasan, R., Vandekerckhove, J., “A tutorial on fitting joint models of M/EEG and behavior to understand cognition” (opens in new tab), Behavior Research Methods, vol. 56, pp. 6020-6050, 2024.
Oravecz, Z., Vandekerckhove, J., “Quantifying evidence for—and against—Granger causality with Bayes factors” (opens in new tab), Multivariate Behavioral Research, vol. 59, pp. 1148-1158, 2024.
Vandekerckhove, J., “Commensurability engineering is first and foremost a theoretical exercise” (opens in new tab), Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 47, pp. e63, 2024.
Lucio, P., Vandekerckhove, J., Polanczyk, G., Cogo-Moreira, H., “Is it worthwhile to take account of "guessing" in the performance of the Raven test? Calling for the principle of parsimony for test validation” (opens in new tab), Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment, vol. 39, pp. 100–111, 2021.
Devezer, B., Navarro, D. J., Vandekerckhove, J., Buzbas, E. O., “The case for formal methodology in scientific reform” (opens in new tab), Royal Society Open Science, vol. 8, pp. 200805, 2021.

Most Cited Publications

Vandekerckhove, J., Tuerlinckx, F., Lee, M. D., “Hierarchical diffusion models for two-choice response times” (opens in new tab), Psychological Methods, vol. 16, pp. 44–62, 2011.
Dutilh, G., Vandekerckhove, J., Forstmann, B., Keuleers, E., Brysbaert, M., Wagenmakers, E., “Testing theories of post-error slowing” (opens in new tab), Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 7, pp. 454–465, 2012.
Etz, A., Vandekerckhove, J., “A Bayesian perspective on the Reproducibility Project: Psychology” (opens in new tab), PLOS ONE, vol. 11, pp. e0149794, 2016.
Vandekerckhove, J., Tuerlinckx, F., “Fitting the Ratcliff diffusion model to experimental data” (opens in new tab), Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, vol. 14, pp. 1011–1026, 2007.
Vandekerckhove, J., Tuerlinckx, F., “Diffusion Model Analysis with MATLAB: A DMAT Primer” (opens in new tab), Behavior Research Methods, vol. 40, pp. 61–72, 2008.
Etz, A., Vandekerckhove, J., “Introduction to Bayesian inference for psychology” (opens in new tab), Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, vol. 25, pp. 5–34, 2018.
Murphy, P., Vandekerckhove, J., Nieuwenhuis, S., “Pupil-linked arousal determines variability in perceptual decision making” (opens in new tab), PLOS Computational Biology, vol. 10, pp. e1003854, 2014.
Dutilh, G., Vandekerckhove, J., Tuerlinckx, F., Wagenmakers, E., “A diffusion model decomposition of the practice effect” (opens in new tab), Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, vol. 16, pp. 1026–1036, 2009.
Nunez, M. D., Vandekerckhove, J., Srinivasan, R., “How attention influences perceptual decision making: Single-trial EEG correlates of drift-diffusion model parameters” (opens in new tab), Journal of Mathematical Psychology, vol. 76, pp. 117–130, 2017.
Baribault, B., Donkin, C., Little, D., Trueblood, J., Oravecz, Z., van Ravenzwaaij, D., White, C., De Boeck, P., Vandekerckhove, J., “Metastudies for robust tests of theory” (opens in new tab), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 115, pp. 2607–2612, 2018.

Contact Information

Website: https://cidlab.com

Email: joachim@uci.edu

Phone: (949) 824-5958

Address: 2324 Social & Behavioral Sciences Gateway

This profile was created with the help of AI.

Last updated on 9/15/2026.