Meet the Lab

The Judgment and Decision Making Lab at the University of South Florida was founded by Sandra L. Schneider, Ph.D. The lab currently has four graduate students, undergraduate honors students, and several research assistants. Research is conducted in several areas of judgment and decision making including motivation, Bayesian reasoning, luck and fortune, risk perception, and risk comprehension.

Current Graduate Students

Austin Katz, BA: Austin is a Ph.D. student in the CNS program here at USF. Austin is from Long Island, New York and earned a BA from Lehigh University. His research interests focus on debiasing techniques and information preferences in decision making. When not in the lab, you can find Austin playing music and/or video games, catching Pokémon, reading comic books and baking the perfect sourdough bread. He can be reached via email here.

Jordan Martin, BS: Jordan (she/her) is a PhD student who joined the CNS Psychology program at USF in 2020. She has a background in cognitive neuroscience, with work addressing working memory capacity and decision making. Her current research focuses on risk preferences and decision-making strategies and how they may change depending on the emotional context of the decision as well as one's overall mood. Jordan is from Kansas City, Missouri, and she can often be found sipping chai tea or having a Marvel movie marathon. She can be reached via email here.

Current Research Assistants

Marcus Cumberbatch, BA: Marcus is a recent graduate, having received his BA in Psychology from USF in 2021. Marcus' research interests include judgment and decision making, particularly within the areas of biases and heuristics.

Brittnee Hampton: I am a recent USF alumni with a BA in Psychology. I have been with the JDM Lab since 2020. My research interests include social and cognitive psychology.

Zoe Ritchotte: Zoe started at USF in 2020 and is currently pursuing her BA in psychology and plans on continuing at USF to earn her MA in the psychological sciences. Her main research interest is the effect that subliminal messaging can have on human behavior.

Caitlin Franklin: Hi! My name is Caitlin Franklin. I am a junior at USF majoring in Psychology.

Reilly Orman: Hello! My name is Reilly, and I am one of the RAs in the JDM Lab. I am a psychology major, and I hope to pursue research someday in Cognitive Psychology.

Past Graduate Students

Elizabeth Fuller, MA: Elizabeth came to USF in 2012. She received her MA in Psychology at American University and her BS in Psychology from Towson University. Elizabeth studies the influence of presentation format and affect on choice. She can be reached via email here.

Sandra Kauffman, MA: Sandra came to USF in 2011. She received her BA in Psychology from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick. Sandy's current research interests focus on judgment and decision making, particularly experience-based decisions and the role of skill and chance in risky decision making. She can be reached via email here.

Andrea Ranieri, MA: Andrea Ranieri came to USF in 2012. A graduate from the University of Central Florida, Andrea studies variables that push individuals to make risk-averse or risk-seeking decision. Specifically, Andrea studies how experiencing gains and losses through context versus probabilistic gains and losses affect decision making. She is also interested in the potential role of luck as a contributing factor in decision making under risk and uncertainty. She can be reached via email here.

Alaina Talboy, MA: Alaina Talboy came to USF in 2013. She completed her MA in Experimental Psychology from the University of West Florida and her BA in Psychology from Saint Leo University. Alaina studies how people understand and incorporate probabilistic information to make personal decisions in medicine, law, and other contexts. She is interested in exploring how proabilistic information is understood when presented in different numerical formats. She can be reached via email here.