Research Topics

The monitoring of one's own knowledge during study
 Prof. Asher Koriat

Several projects have been conducted in recent years concerned with the question of how learners monitor their degree of competence during study, and how they allocate learning resources to different items. These projects have been guided by a model that was advanced in a paper by Koriat (1997) on the monitoring of one’s own knowledge during study, which appeared in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 

The intricate relationships between monitoring and control in metacogntion: cause-and-effect relation between subjective experience and behavior -  were further investigated in Koriat et al. (2006) which appeared in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. This project later gave rise to a developmental project.

One of the most intriguing questions in the study of reading processes is how online comprehension is achieved. Although the meaning of a sentence is construed from the sentence as a whole, readers do not wait until the completion of the sentence to extract its meaning incrementally. Our previous studies postulated structural precedence through the processing downstream structural cues (e.g., function words) as a vehicle for achieving online incremental integration and comprehension. Our current research proceeds along two lines of investigation: The first focuses on the processing of function words and its contribution to structural precedence, and the second focuses on reading prosody as a vehicle to study on-line structural processing.

This research extends the project of Asher Koriat and Morris Goldsmith on the strategic regulation of memory performance (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 1994; Psychological Review, 1996; Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1996). This research examines how people utilize metacognitive monitoring and control processes to strategically regulate the quantity and accuracy of the information that they report from memory.

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The fundamental problem of perceptual organization has been recognized as central for understanding human perception. People perceive an organized visual world consisting of discrete objects that are coherently organized in space. Some internal processes of organization that operate on the retinal mosaic of intensities and colors that arises from external objects must be responsible for this achievement. The research described here is intended to seek out the principles and the mechanisms underlying visual perceptual organization. Using several different experimental paradigms we attempt to shed light on the following critical issues:

	The structures provided by early perceptual processing: simple properties or more complex configurations.
	The time course of perceptual organization.
	The stimulus factors that engage the mechanism of organization.
	The role of past experience and familiarity in perceptual organization.
	The role of attention in perceptual organization.
	Ontogenesis of perceptual organization.

 This project investigates the relative dominance of component versus holistic information in face perception within a framework developed in the field of object perception (Kimchi, 1994, 2003). Three series of experiments are proposes to examine:

(1) Whether the discriminability of isolated facial components predicts the discriminability of whole faces composed of these components.

(2) The ability to selectively attend to either a holistic property in the face while ignoring irrelevant variations in a component, and vice versa, 

(3) The microgenesis of face representations

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A great deal of evidence points to the existence of two independent visual systems. One, the dorsal system, resides primarily in the posterior parietal lobe, while the second, the ventral system, primarily in the inferior temporal lobe. Current thinking suggests that the ventral system deals with identification, while the dorsal system deals with the visual control of action. Several experiments have been conducted in our project entitled: "Seeking Evidence for the Independent Functioning of the Two Perceptual Systems: Dorsal System Pickup of Optic Flow with Concurrent Ventral Perception of Object Identity."  

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This project addresses the implications of a proposed general conceptual framework for understanding visual attention. The framework, provisionally named the hierarchical select- organize- navigate-select (H-SONS) framework, is at this point a loose collection of principled assumptions that can be used to derive working hypotheses regarding the complex interplay of object-based and space-based attentional processing. The basic insights embodied in the framework concern the dynamic, flexible, and interactive nature of visual attention, in particular, the idea that attention is constantly selecting from among hierarchically organized spatial or grouped-array (object) representations, that attentional selection itself acts to change the (hierarchical) organization of the visual information, that attention may “navigate” within the scene either by orienting (shifts of attention between locations/objects at the same hierarchical level), focusing (zooming in or out to more local/global levels of object structure or space), or both, and that subsequent selections and chosen modes of navigation are contextually dependent on previous selections.

The project has three main branches: (a) the role of spatial focus of attention in object-based attentional selection, (b) strategic versus automatic control of object-based attentional selection, and (c) object-based and space-based attentional navigation of hierarchically structured displays.

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Visual Spatial Attention  
Dr. Yaffa Yeshurun

The importance of the selection processes termed attention is rarely doubted. By giving priority to relevant information over non-relevant information, these processes help us comprehend the overwhelming amount of visual information confronting us at any given moment. The main objective of this study is to reveal the nature of the mechanisms underlying spatial attention – the selective processing of information at a given location in space, and understand how it aids perceptual processes. In particular, focusing on transient attention, which is the more automatic, stimulus-driven component of spatial attention. 

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Control processes are the class of cognitive activities that initiate, coordinate, synchronize, and regulate the conduct of goal-directed behavior. Control in this context, encapsulates the ensemble of activities, processes and mechanisms that specify and bind together elements of stimulus information, response alternatives, memory representations and computational processes, in the service of tasks and the pursuit of intentions.

Our pervious research in this area has been summarized in two recent book chapters. One discusses the nature and functional dimensions of control (Gopher 2006), the other summarizes the research on training of executive control skill (Gopher 2007). Our current research includes projects address basic research questions, while others apply and extend the models of results of basic research to application studies.

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The main objective of our research on individual differences and decision style is to develop a model that will comprise the basic elements of individual differences in decision making. The first goal was the examination of the construct of risk taking from an individual difference perspective; and the assessment of the main components modulating individuals' risk taking. The second goal was the examination of the ecological validity of the proposed model by using it for predicting real-world risky behaviors. For the first goal we proposed a novel approach for evaluating decision models based on their ability to elicit valid parameters at the individual level (Yechiam and Busemeyer, in press; Yechiam & Ert; 2007). Using this approach we were able to understand better the different constructs modulating individual difference in risk taking (Ert & Yechiam, working paper; Koritzky & Yechiam, submitted; Plescak, Yechiam & Lejuez, submitted; Bishara et al., in revision). Our main findings show that risk perception is a product of independent innate constructs including the sensitivity to gains and losses and the sensitivity to payoff magnitude. Also utilizing this approach, we proposed new models for complex decision tasks, including a model for the Go/No-Go discrimination task (Yechiam, Goodnight et al., 2006) and a revised model for the Iowa Gambling task (Yechiam & Ert., 2007). For the second goal of assessing the model's ecological validity, we studied the advantage of different types of decisions tasks for predicting real-world risky behavior (Koritzky & Yechiam, submitted). We also conducted several applied studies, elucidating the advantage of decision tasks in predicting criminal behavior (e.g., Yechiam, Kanz et al., 2008; Lev et al., 2008; Farah, Yechiam et al., in press), and for diagnosing clinical disorders associated with risky and impulsive behavior (e.g., Yechiam, Hayden et al., in press; Johnson, Yechiam et al., 2006; Sevy et al., 2007; Kester et al., 2006) and the effect of drugs on decision parameters (Lane, Yechiam and Busemeyer, 2006; Sevy et al., 2006). For conciseness these applied studies are not detailed below. We plan to follow these studies with more in depth studies of the role of decision making in anger and self-control.

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SKILLS- Integrated Project: Multimodal Interfaces for Capturing and Transfer of Skill               Technion PIs: Prof. Daniel Gopher and Dr. Eldad Yechiam          

From the SKILLS site: (http://www.skills-ip.eu/): SKILLS is an Integrated Project in the framework of european IST FP6 strategic objective named “Multimodal Interfaces” and deals with the acquisition, interpretation, storing and transfer of human skill by means of multimodal interfaces, Robotics, Virtual Environments (VE) technologies and Interaction Design methodologies. SKILLS intends to introduce a novel approach to skill capturing, transfer and assessment based on enactive paradigms of interaction between the human operator and the interface system devoted to mimic task conditions. Skill analysis adopts cognitive sciences and interaction design methodologies in order to obtain a digital representation of skill and to develop techniques for its capturing and endering.  SKILLS takes three different application domains into consideration for demonstrators: sport and entertainment, surgery and rehabilitation, manufacturing and industry. Interaction design methodologies are implemented in these contexts in order to address the design of novel interfaces focused on skill transfer and being able to improve task performances or generate innovative processes. The SKILLS Consortium comprehends Universities and Research Centres with expertise in Cognitive Science, Psychology, Interaction Design, Virtual Environments, Augmented Realities and Robotics together with Industries representative of the above specified application domains.

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