He moved to the University of Michigan in 1973 as a Junior Fellow (and married Lynne Reder who was a graduate student there) and returned to Yale in 1976 with tenure.
Anderson's research has used fMRI brain imaging to study how students learn with intelligent tutoring systems.
[12] In a 2012 study, Anderson and Jon Fincham, a colleague at Carnegie Mellon, examined the cognitive stages participants engaged in when solving mathematical problems.
Multi-voxel pattern recognition techniques and Hidden Markov models were used to determine participants' problem solving stages.
The study used a cognitive model that predicted behavioral and activation patterns for specific regions in the brain.