Lab Members

From left to right: Bailee Smith, Dr. Emily Elliott, and Lauren Schiro. Not pictured: Matthew Jimenez and Vincent Medina.

 

Graduate Students

Matthew N. Jimenez, M.A.
mjime16@lsu.edu

Matthew is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Cognitive and Brain Sciences program who started in 2020. He earned a Psychology B.A. from University of California, Davis, where he was a research assistant in the Janata Lab. His primary research interests are in the association between music and memory, measures of musicianship, and individual differences found within musicians.

 

Lauren A. Schiro, M.A.
lschir6@lsu.edu

Lauren is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Cognitive and Brain Sciences program at LSU. She earned her B.S. in Brain and Behavioral Sciences from Purdue University in 2022 and her M.A. in Psychology from LSU in 2024. Her research examines cognitive control, working memory, and attentional regulation, with a particular interest in how cognitive workload and changing task demands shape goal-directed behavior. Her work integrates cognitive theory with applied human-performance research, using behavioral and physiological measures to investigate how people adapt to demanding and dynamic environments. She is especially interested in understanding how cognitive limitations and task conditions interact to influence performance, with applications to complex performance settings.

 

Bailee C. Smith, M.S.
bsmi394@lsu.edu

 

Bailee is a Huel D. Perkins Fellow and Ph.D. student in the Cognitive and Brain Sciences program. She started the Ph.D. in 2025 after earning her B.S. in Psychology (2023) and M.S. in Psychological Science (2025) from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Before joining the EARS Lab, she studied the relationship between inhibitory control and intelligence using eye-tracking methods. She also gained research experience through the Naval Research Enterprise Internship Program at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. Her current research focuses on how memory ability affects serial recall of structured information. She is interested in how differences in cognitive processing affect how people attend to, learn, and remember information.

 

Vincent A. Medina, Ph.D.
vmedin3@lsu.edu

 

Vincent is an Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellow who started in 2026. He earned his Ph.D. in Cognitive and Brain Sciences (2023) from Louisiana State University while in the EARS Lab. He researches decision-making related to AI, global catastrophic risks, and mortality salience, as well as attention control. His postdoctoral research project, "The judge and the advisor: Overtrust in AI during high-stakes threat decision making," specifically examines AI-assisted life-or-death decisions during drone warfare simulations.

 

Other Students (Undergraduate Research Assistants)

Alexander Vincent

Gabriella Robbins

Lia Nair

Antonia Liberatore

Jypsy Haw

Ava Guidry

Tamiah Cross

Fabiola Wise

Hailey Wene

Former Graduate Students

Jessica Y. Hacker, PhD
Alicia Briganti, PhD
Sharon Lynn Eaves, PhD 
Danielle Lutfi-Proctor, PhD
Corey McGill, PhD
Jill Shelton, PhD
Abby South (PhD student in the Music Education program)
Juan Ventura, MA