The Wright State University Department of Psychology welcomes Dr. Assaf Harel.
Dr. Assaf Harel is a cognitive neuroscientist investigating the neural basis of visual recognition. Dr. Harel will head a new lab in the Psychology Department, the Human Neuroscience and Visual Cognition Lab, which will employ a host of behavioral and neuroimaging techniques (such as fMRI and EEG) to study how we perceive and think about the world around us, and how these processes are substantiated in our brain. Dr. Harel’s topics of research include visual expertise, object and scene recognition, perceptual learning, categorization, and top-down control of attention.
Dr. Harel received his PhD degree in cognitive neuropsychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), where he studied expertise in visual object recognition. His post-doctoral research fellowship was at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where he used cutting-edge fMRI analytical methods to study object and scene recognition. Coming to Wright State University, Dr. Harel aims to promote a highly interdisciplinary research bridging diverse theoretical, experimental and applied approaches to uncover how brain activity gives rise to high-level vision in the real world.
