I received my Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology (Cognitive & Neural Sciences) from the University of South Florida. My major domains of expertise are psychometrics, quasi-experimental design and the use of multivariate statistical methods, including exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis. I am also an expert in the development, validation, and application of psychological measures.

My program of research has focused primarily on the nature, dimensionality and assessment of individual differences in different aspects of trait-curiosity — especially epistemic curiosity, which is plays a central role in self-directed learning, intellectual engagement, and adaptive problem solving, and is critical to intellectual growth (For listing of publications click here and for access to specific scales, click here).

My study of curiosity is interdisciplinary in nature, and integrates perspectives from personality psychology, memory and cognition, and affective experience in the activation and satiation of curiosity (this framework is detailed in Litman, 2005 and in Litman, 2019). Using these approaches, my research has examined relationships between levels of trait-curiosity, the activation of emotional-motivational curiosity states, setting learning-goals, and attaining varying levels of achievement in academic and workplace settings.

More recently, I have extended this work to explainable AI (XAI) and human-AI teaming, examining how people seek and evaluate explanations and how this shapes trust and reliance on intelligent systems (see details here).

Several of my psychometric instruments have been translated and validated in other languages, and the examination of curiosity across cultures is an ongoing area of interest for me as well (for more details, click here). This cross-cultural research has led to invitations to present and discuss my work internationally, including invited talks and keynotes addresses, reflecting the growing global interest in curiosity-driven inquiry and learning (to see selected presentation materials, click here).

I am pleased to note that my research on curiosity and related topics has received considerable attention by my peers, as reflected in citation and impact metrics reported by  Scopus  (h = 25)  Publons/Web of Science  (h = 22), and Google Scholar (h = 31). Based on normative data reported in the APS Observer, these metrics place my scholarly impact at approximately the 95th percentile for university-affiliated psychological scientists at my career stage.

My research program has received external support through competitive and invited funding mechanisms, and my work has also attracted the attention of popular media outlets such as Psychology Today and Livescience (for a listing of media publications, click here).

Presently, I hold the rank of Associate Professor of Psychology (part time) at the University of Maine at Machias. I am also a Visiting Research Scientist and research consultant at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC). In this role my recent work on curiosity has expanded to include human-AI teaming and XAI, with a focus on how epistemic curiosity can support critical thinking and trust calibration in human-machine systems.

For additional information, please see my profiles on Google Scholar , Research Gate  , Semantic Scholar, ORCID, IHMC, or my faculty profile at the University of Maine at Machias.

If you are interested in collaborating with me on new projects, please click here.

See my latest interview on curiosity here Curiosity: From Open Wonder to Magnificent Obsessions