Dekel Abeles

• Tel Aviv University

The ability to accurately retrieve visual details of past events is a fundamental cognitive function relevant for daily life. While a visual stimulus contains an abundance of information, only some of it is later encoded into long-term memory representations. However, an ongoing challenge has been to isolate memory representations that integrate va...

People show vast variability in skill performance and learning. What determines a person's individual performance and learning ability? In this study we explored the possibility to predict participants’ future performance and learning, based on their behavior during initial skill acquisition. We recruited a large online multi-session sample of part...

How do people estimate the time of past events? A prominent hypothesis suggests that there are multiple timing systems which operate in parallel, depending on circumstances. However, quantitative evidence supporting this hypothesis focused solely on short time-scales (seconds to minutes) and lab-produced events. Furthermore, these studies typically...

People show vast variability in skill learning. What determines a person’s individual learning ability? In this study we explored the possibility to predict participants’ future learning, based on their behavior during initial skill acquisition. We recruited a large online multi-session sample of participants performing a sequential tapping skill l...

Sensory organs are not only involved in passively transmitting sensory input, but are also involved in actively seeking it. Some sensory organs move dynamically to allow highly prioritized input to be detected by their most sensitive parts. Such ‘active sensing’ systems engage in pursuing relevant input, relying on attentional prioritizations. Howe...

Background: The COVID-19 global pandemic of 2020 brought about a surge of psychological research focusing on its cognitive and emotional impact. In a recent study, Kachanoff et al. (1) published the Integrated Covid-19 Threat Scale – a 10-item scale for measuring the perceived symbolic and realistic threats of COVID-19. In their study Kachanoff et...

Eye movements are inhibited prior to the onset of temporally-predictable visual targets. This oculomotor inhibition effect could be considered a marker for the formation of temporal expectations and the allocation of temporal attention in the visual domain. Here we show that eye movements are also inhibited before predictable auditory targets. In t...

The COVID-19 global pandemic of 2020 brought about a surge of psychological research focusing on its cognitive and emotional impact. In a recent study, Kachanoff et al. (2020) published The Integrated Covid-19 Threat Scale - a 10-items scale for measuring the perceived symbolic and realistic threats of COVID-19. We have translated this scale to Heb...

Eye movements are inhibited prior to the onset of temporally-predictable visual targets. This oculomotor inhibition effect could be considered a marker for the formation of temporal expectations and the allocation of temporal attention in the visual domain. Here we show that eye movements are also inhibited before predictable auditory targets. In t...

Background: The COVID-19 global pandemic of 2020 brought about a surge of psychological research focusing on its cognitive and emotional impact. In a recent study, Kachanoff et al. (1) published the Integrated Covid-19 Threat Scale – a 10-item scale for measuring the perceived symbolic and realistic threats of COVID-19. In their study Kachanoff et...

Despite growing scientific interest in the sexually objectifying male gaze, the relation between men’s gazing behavior and their sexually objectifying attitudes has not yet been examined. The present study addressed this gap in the literature. Sixty-one heterosexual Israeli men viewed photographs of female targets while their spontaneous eye moveme...

Saccades shift the gaze rapidly every few hundred milliseconds from one fixated location to the next, producing a flow of visual input into the visual system even in the absence of changes in the environment. During fixation, small saccades called microsaccades are produced 1-3 times per second, generating a flow of visual input. The characteristic...

The accurate extraction of signals out of noisy environments is a major challenge of the perceptual system. Forming temporal expectations and continuously matching them with perceptual input can facilitate this process. In humans, temporal expectations are typically assessed using behavioral measures, which provide only retrospective but no real-ti...

Background During visual exploration or free-view, gaze positioning is largely determined by the tendency to maximize visual saliency: more salient locations are more likely to be fixated. However, when visual input is completely irrelevant for performance, such as with non-visual tasks, this saliency maximization strategy may be less advantageous...

Sensory organs are thought to sample the environment rhythmically thereby providing periodic perceptual input. Whisking and sniffing are governed by oscillators which impose rhythms on the motor-control of sensory acquisition and consequently on sensory input. Saccadic eye movements are the main visual sampling mechanism in primates, and were sugge...

During visual exploration of a scene, the eye-gaze tends to be directed toward more salient image-locations, containing more information. However, while performing non-visual tasks, such information-seeking behavior could be detrimental to performance, as the perception of irrelevant but salient visual input may unnecessarily increase the cognitive...