What Happened to the 'Mental' in 'Mental" Disorders

People often seek help for mental problems because they are suffering subjectively. Yet, for decades, the subjective experience of patients has been marginalized. This is in part due to the dominant medical model of mental illness, which has tended to treat subjective experience as a quaint relic of a scientifically less enlightened time. To the extent that subjective symptoms are related to the underlying problem, it is often assumed that they will be taken care of if the more objective symptoms, such as behavioral and physiological responses are treated.

Rethinking behavior in the light of evolution

Abstract: In psychology and neuroscience, the human brain is usually described as an information processing system that encodes and manipulates representations of knowledge to produce plans of action. This view leads to a decomposition of brain functions into putative processes such as object recognition, memory, decision-making, action planning, etc., inspiring the search for the neural correlates of these processes. However, neurophysiological data does not support many of the predictions of these classic subdivisions.

Integration of Personal vs. Social Information for Sustainable Decisions on Climate Action

Some of my past and current research looks at "decisions from  experience,” i.e., decisions based on the personally experienced outcomes of past choices, along the lines of reinforcement learning models and how such learning and updating is related to and differs from the way in which people and other intelligent agents use other sources of information, e.g., vicarious feedback (anecdotal/social and/or in the form of statistical distributions of outcomes) or science- or model-based outcome predictions to make “decisions from description.”  What happens when these different sources of foreca

Hearing Ethnicity: classification, stereotypization and processing of socially marked phonetic features in Modern Hebrew

The thesis explores the relationship between social and phonological perception, relying on case studies from Modern Hebrew (MH). The social setting is the ethnically-based dichotomy between "Mizrahi" (Middle Eastern and North-African background) and "Ashkenazi" (European background) Jewish-Israelis.

Redrawing the lines between language and graphics

Graphic and verbal communication are typically thought to work in very different ways. While speech uses a conventionalized vocabulary that is acquired from children’s environments, drawing is assumed to reflect the articulation of how people see and think, with learning based on “artistic talent.” Yet, research from linguistics and cognitive science upends these assumptions, suggesting that these domains are actually not so distinctive.