According to the MacArthur Foundation, which named him a MacArthur Fellow in 2019, "Tenenbaum is one of the first to develop and apply probabilistic and statistical modeling to the study of human learning, reasoning, and perception, and to show how these models can explain a fundamental challenge of cognition: how our minds understand so much from so little, so quickly.
His mother was a teacher[4] and his father is Internet commerce pioneer Jay Martin Tenenbaum.
[5] His research direction was strongly influenced by his parents' interest in teaching and learning, and later by interactions with cognitive psychologist Roger Shepard, during his years at Yale.
[2] His work focuses on analyzing probabilistic inference as the engine of human cognition and as a means to develop machine learning.
The MacArthur webpage describes his work as follows: "Combining computational models with behavioral experiments to shed light on human learning, reasoning, and perception, and exploring how to bring artificial intelligence closer to the capabilities of human thinking.