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Trent is a Lupina Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo. He completed his Joint Ph.D. in Social and Decision Sciences and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. His research broadly investigates the role that higher-order metacognitive processes play in reasoning for human and AI agents. Recently, his work has focused on how decision makers develop metacognitive knowledge about their choice behavior.

Outside of work, Trent loves watching baseball, playing video games, and baking sweet treats.

Google Scholar
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=QuzZN0QAAAAJ&hl=en

Research Area:

Higher-Order Reasoning

Making good decisions often requires us to evaluate the quality of our reasoning processes and adjust them on the fly to adapt to ever-changing choice environments. What metacognitive processes allow us to make judgements? How do we translate these judgments into actionable insights? Can AI agents engage in similar metacognitive processes?

Representative publications:
Cash, T. N., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2025). Assessing metacognitive knowledge in subjective decisions: The Knowledge of Weights paradigm. Thinking & Reasoning, 31(3), 331-373. https://doi.org/10.1080/13546783.2024.2426543

Cash, T. N., Oppenheimer, D. M., Christie, S., & Devgan, M. (2025). Quantifying uncert-AI-nty: Testing the accuracy of LLMs’ confidence judgments. Memory & Cognition. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-025-01755-4

Cash, T. N., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2024). Generative chatbots AI-n’t experts: Exploring cognitive and metacognitive limitations that hinder expertise in generative chatbots. Journal of Applied Research in Memory & Cognition, 13(4), 490-494. https://doi.org/10.1037/mac0000202

Cash, T. N., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2024). Parental rights or parental wrongs: Parents’ metacognitive knowledge of the factors that influence their school choice decisions. PLOS ONE, 19(4), e0301768. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0301768

About:

I am an interdisciplinary cognitive scientist, currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Computational Social Science with professors Igor Grossmann and Sam Johnson. I am conducting agent-based modelling of wise decision-making that reflects the complexity and cultural diversity of real-world scenarios.

Outside work, I enjoy swimming, trekking, running, bird-watching, reading, listening to music, and playing the violin and keyboard (both very badly).

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhishek-dedhe-64307896/
• Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=4O5Iv4sAAAAJ

Representative work:
Dedhe, A. M., Clatterbuck, H., Piantadosi, S. T., & Cantlon, J. F. (2023). Origins of hierarchical logical reasoning. Cognitive science, 47(2), 13250. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cogs.13250

Dedhe, A. M., Piantadosi, S. T., & Cantlon, J. F. (2023). Cognitive mechanisms underlying recursive pattern processing in human adults. Cognitive science, 47(4), e13273. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cogs.13273

Dedhe, A. M., Chowkase, A. A., Gogate, N. V., Kshirsagar, M. M., Naphade, R., Naphade, A., ... & Pandit, P. S. (2024). Conventional and frugal methods of estimating COVID-19-related excess deaths and undercount factors. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 10378. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-57634-6

Lingguo (Lin) holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne. His work focuses on behavioural insights into decision-making, specifically regarding individuals' preferences for social comparison information, the utility derived from anticipation, and how comparative language use affects loss aversion. Currently, he is working on the Affective Imagination Theory (AIT) project with Sam Johnson.

Outside of work, he enjoys walking in the woods to look at birds or enjoying a good movie at IMAX.

Research description: His work focuses on behavioural insights into decision-making. His research on anticipatory utility investigates how the excitement of waiting can buffer against the negative effects of  delays on the realization of the consumption. He also explores the demand for information, specifically finding that individuals' preferences for seeking social comparison information depend heavily on whether the information can be used for future performance. Additionally, he studies how comparative language use can affect individuals' attitude for loss aversion. Currently, he is working on Affective Imagination Theory (AIT) project with Sam Johnson.

Google Scholar link: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=tV9M6PUAAAAJ&hl=en