Rate My Professor Adam Osth

Adam Osth is an Associate Professor in Psychology at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne. He received his PhD from The Ohio State University in April 2014, supervised by Simon Dennis, with research focused on computational modeling of cognition, particularly recognition memory and serial recall. From July 2014 to January 2016, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Newcastle, collaborating with Simon Dennis and Andrew Heathcote on evidence accumulation models including the diffusion decision model and linear ballistic accumulator, as well as hierarchical Bayesian modeling techniques using differential-evolution Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. In January 2016, Osth joined the University of Melbourne as a Lecturer and progressed to Associate Professor. He serves as the Principal Investigator and Laboratory Director of the Melbourne Computational Memory Lab, which develops and tests computational models to address questions on forgetting mechanisms, event encoding and representation in memory, and decision-making based on retrieved memory content. The lab includes PhD students such as Jason Zhou, Lyulei Zhang, Haomin Chen, Jie Sun, and Dan Hutchinson, supervised on topics like source memory, word recognition models, and confidence judgments.

Osth specializes in empirical and computational approaches to human memory, encompassing episodic memory, recognition memory, source memory, serial recall, interference effects, and decision processes. His contributions have earned the 2022 William K. Estes Early Career Award from the Society for Mathematical Psychology and an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA, DE170100106). With over 1,188 citations on Google Scholar, his influence in mathematical psychology and cognitive modeling is notable. Key publications include 'Sources of Interference in Memory Across Development' (Psychological Science, 2022), 'The list strength effect in source memory: Data and a global matching model' (Journal of Memory and Language, 2018), 'Modeling the dynamics of recognition memory testing with an integrated model of retrieval and decision making' (Cognitive Psychology, 2018), 'A circular diffusion model of continuous-outcome source memory retrieval: Contrasting continuous and threshold accounts' (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2021), and 'Sequential sampling models in memory' (2024). Osth engages in public outreach through University of Melbourne Pursuit articles on memory phenomena like context reinstatement and olfactory memory triggers.