Roger Ratcliff is a Distinguished Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences and a professor in the Department of Psychology. Ratcliff’s work with mathematical models has been applied to a wide-range of situations including normal cognitive processing, aging and cognitive deficits. One of his most important contributions is the diffusion model of decision making, which has had an immense impact on neuroscience and decision sciences research. The diffusion decision model allows detailed explanations of behavior in two-choice discrimination tasks.
Ratcliff has won many awards during his career. This includes the 2010 University Distinguished Scholar Award. He has also received awards from the National Academy of Sciences, the National Institute of Mental Health and the Society of Experimental Psychologists. He is on the Institute of Scientific Information’s list of highly-cited researchers — one of only 32 at Ohio State with this status.