Joseph Sommer is a cognitive scientist researching how people form and revise their beliefs. His work emphasizes the severe difficulties of forming accurate beliefs in our extremely complicated world as well as how the mind adaptively directs its limited resources to navigate complex environments. His research draws on a broad intersection of fields relevant to belief including the philosophy of mental representation, epistemology, and the psychology of persuasion, reasoning, and judgment and decision making. His current work aims at understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying belief, including how beliefs are updated (or not) in response to evidence. Joseph received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Rutgers University and spent two years as a postdoctoral associate at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science.