Professional Bio

Research Interests

I retired from Penn State in 2016 after 22 years on the faculty to move to the University of California, Riverside, where I could be near family in Southern California. Leaving Penn State was hard because I had, and still have, fond memories of State College, the Psychology Department, and my students there. My research at Penn State was about (and continues to be about) cognition and action: How do we plan and control our physical actions? If this were an easy problem, robots would be more advanced than they are, and we would be better able to help those with neuro-motor and related problems. I believe that the control of action is at the heart of cognition.

Recent Publications

Rosenbaum, D. A. (2014). It’s A Jungle In There: How Competition And Cooperation In The Brain Shape The Mind. New York: Oxford University Press

Rosenbaum, D. A., Vaughan, J., & Wyble, B. (2015). MATLAB For Behavioral Scientists (Second Edition). Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group.

Rosenbaum, D. A. (2017). Knowing Hands: The Cognitive Psychology of Manual Control. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Rosenbaum, D. A. (2019). MATLAB Blues – How Behavioral Scientists and Others Can Learn From Mistakes For Better, Happier Programming. Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group.

Rosenbaum, D. A. (2022). Action, Mind, and Brain – An Introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Rosenbaum, D. A. (2024). Cognitive Control of Action. Selected Works of David A. Rosenbaum. World Library of Psychologists Series. Routledge Psychology Press.