My name is Trent N. Cash and I'm a 5th-year Joint Ph.D. student in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences and the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. My research largely focuses on the role of higher order reasoning - particularly metacognition - in judgment and decision making.

My primary line of research focuses on the role of metacognition in subjective, multi-attribute choice decisions, such as choosing colleges, buying houses, or selecting romantic partners. I am particularly interested in understanding the degree to which decision makers have metacognitive knowledge of the factors that influence these decisions and exploring contexts that may promote or inhibit this knowledge. My current focus is on validating and implementing the novel Knowledge of Weights (KoW) paradigm, which I created to assess metacognitive knowledge in subjective decisions. This line of research constitutes my Dissertation and is funded by a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (#2333553) from the National Science Foundation.

In a second line of research, I study the metacognitive capacities of large language models chatbots (LLMs), such as ChatGPT. To do so, I ask LLMs to complete experimental tasks from the metacognition literature and compare their performance to that of humans. For example, I recently completed a series of studies demonstrating that LLMs are capable of making confidence judgments for their own predictions about future events that are about as well-calibrated as those made by humans. Going forward, I plan to test LLMs' metacognitive abilities using other paradigms, such as the Knowledge of Weights (KoW) and Judgment of Learning (JoL) paradigms.

In a third line of research, I study decisions that individuals make about whether or not to disclose information about themselves. My current work in this space focuses on test-optional college admissions policies, which allow applicants to choose whether or not to submit standardized test scores when applying to college (e.g., ACTs, SATs). Within this context, my present focus is on exploring how individual differences in strategic reasoning influence both applicant disclosure decisions and the inferences that admissions officers make about students who omit their scores.

I am also interested in studying student learning and development. In one line of research, I study the psychological development of gifted students. Currently, this line of research is focused on a 4-year longitudinal study (data collected 2019-2022) evaluating the differential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on gifted and non-identified students. I also have lines of research testing the efficacy of interventions - such as small-group discussions and collaborations with LLMs - designed to enhance student learning and promote the development of metacognitive skills.

To learn more about the research I am working on right now - including some projects that were not described here - check out my Publications and Projects.