April 16, 2020	Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the 5th EADM summer school has been postponed to next year. More information: ldmss.org
January 31, 2020	Save the date for the 5th EADM summer school on the topic of learning and decision making! More information on our website: ldmss.org
July 04, 2019	I will present my recent work with the short title "Violations of economic rationality in reinforcement learning are driven by a saliency-dependent reward-prediction-error signal in the ventral striatum" at the Neuroeconomics in Dublin.
May 13, 2019	New website, still very much under construction.
January 10, 2019	I will be joining the Universitat Pompeu Fabra as an assistant professor in September 2019.

Humans face many different kinds of decisions in their everyday lives, such as what to eat for lunch or where to go on vacation. Attempts to understand the principles underlying such decisions traditionally involve an axiomatic system of preferences and are often used as the benchmark for economically "rational" human behavior. I am particularly interested in behavior that deviates from such notions of rationality as I believe that those situations provide an important window to human cognition.

In my main line of research, I investigate the cognitive processes underlying such "irrational behavior" with a particular focus on the role of attention in the formation of context-dependent preferences, so-called context effects. I rely on formal modeling of cognition and combine it with evidence from behavioral experiments and psychophysiological data to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the cognitive processes underlying human decision making.

Decisions under risk and uncertainty

Learning and decision making

Context-dependent preferences

Cognitive modeling

Fontanesi, L., Gluth, S., Spektor, M. S., & Rieskamp, J. (2019). A reinforcement learning diffusion decision model for value-based decisions. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(4), 1099–1121. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-018-1554-2

Spektor, M. S., Gluth, S., Fontanesi, L., & Rieskamp, J. (2019). How similarity between choice options affects decisions from experience: The accentuation of differences model. Psychological Review, 126(1), 52–88. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000122

Gluth, S.*, Spektor, M. S.*, & Rieskamp, J. (2018). Value-based attentional capture affects multi-alternative decision making. eLife, 7, 1–36. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.39659

Spektor, M. S., & Kellen, D. (2018). The relative merit of empirical priors in non-identifiable and sloppy models: Applications to models of learning and decision-making. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 25(6), 2047–2068. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-018-1446-5. Open-access full text: http://rdcu.be/J18i

Spektor, M. S., Kellen, D., & Hotaling, J. M. (2018). When the good looks bad: An experimental exploration of the repulsion effect. Psychological Science, 29(8), 1309–1320. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618779041

Spektor, M. S., & Wulff, D. U. (submitted). Myopia drives reckless behavior in the face of over-taxation. Preprint available on PsyArXiv: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/34gzp

Kraemer, P., Fontanesi, L., Spektor, M. S., & Gluth, S. (submitted). Response time models separate single- and dual-process accounts of memory-based decisions. Preprint available on PsyArXiv: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/4pqyx

Spektor, M. S., & Seidler, H. (submitted). Irrelevant outcomes lead to violations of economic rationality.

Voormann, A., Spektor, M. S., & Klauer, K. C. (submitted). The simultaneous recognition of multiple objects: A process analysis.

Spektor, M. S.*, Gluth, S.*, & Rieskamp, J. (in preparation). Saliency distorts reward processing during reinforcement learning.

Spektor, M. S., & Wulff, D. U. (in preparation). Strategic search in decisions from experience.

Kellen, D.*, Spektor, M. S.*, Rieskamp, J., & Klauer, K. C. (in preparation). Context dependency of loss aversion.

Spektor, M. S., & Yuan, T. (2020). Digitalisierung in der Juristenausbildung. Neue Juristische Wochenschrift, 15, 52–88.

As a behavioral scientist, I am fascinated by all the different facets and the complexity of human cognition. Every new discovery not only uncovers part of that complex puzzle but also reveals more uncharted waters ahead of us. I believe that this curiosity of wanting to obtain a deeper understanding of the human nature is the main driving force behind both good research and learning success.

I offer supervision of theses. If you are interested in working on any of my research topics, feel free to contact me.

I am currently teaching "Microeconomics II" (click here for the syllabus).