ELSC congratulates Dr. Aviel Sulem for receiving the Shimon Peres Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2024.
Aviel studied Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Music Performance (violin) at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, and obtained his Ph.D. in Music Psychology at Bar-Ilan University.
Aviel is a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Prof. Merav Ahissar, working on human perceptual learning. His focus during his postdoc at ELSC is decyphering perceptual biases, as they offer a window into neural computations underlying perception. He conducts psychophysical experiments in the auditory and visual modalities and works on computational modeling of behavior.
He recently published in iScience, together with Dr. Itai Lieder and Prof. Merav Ahissar, exciting results that have important implications for the proposed mechanism underlying perceptual biases in the auditory modality driven by recent stimulus history. In contrast to the predictive-coding hypothesis, assuming a prior operating in a top-down manner, this work showed that low-level representations of recent stimuli form local priors that operate bottom-up on low-level features of the current stimulus through local memory circuits. This mechanism may underlie continuity between similar low-level features belonging to different object categories in the auditory modality.
Aviel is currently conducting a psychophysical experiment on face perception, aimed at assessing the temporal tuning of recency biases, that is, how long the effect of the previous stimulus lasts on the current stimulus percept. An additional goal is to reveal what parameters characterize performers who have a systematic repulsive bias compared to those having an attractive bias toward recent stimuli when both types of performers are exposed to the same stimulus statistics, presented under the same temporal dynamics.
The prestigious Shimon Peres Postdoctoral Fellowship was established through a gift from Mrs. Lily Safra.
