Julia Trommershaeuser www.allpsych.uni-giessen.de/julia/

I spent three years as a postdoc at NYU to work with Larry Maloney and Mike Landy on human decision-making under risk and uncertainty. In our experiments, subjects win or lose points by rapidly touching colored circular regions displayed on a computer screen. We find that participants in our experiments are very good at choosing strategies that come close to maximizing expected gain. The optimal strategies observed in our experiments are in surprising contrast to the results in many traditional economic decision making tasks, in which subjects often misrepresent the probability of rare events and typically fail to maximize expected gain.

In 2004, I joined the Dept. of Psychology at Giessen University, Germany, to set up my own lab. I continue to work on questions in the field of human decision-making under risk and uncertainty, trying to understand how the brain makes use of sensory processing, feedback and prior knowledge.