Last week, we had the pleasure of hosting students from the Nativ Program—an excellence program for outstanding B.A. students in the School of Psychological Sciences. During their visit, the students attended two lectures highlighting the lab’s primary research domains. Michal Oren, an M.A. student, presented the Nova Project, while Gadi Drori, a Ph.D. student, introduced the Unreal Project.

Our latest preprint is now live on bioRxiv! We developed a new virtual reality paradigm to simulate “Virtual Hallucinations” and explore how people judge the Sense of Reality – our internal gauge for whether experiences feel real. By combining psychophysics, physiology (pupil, heart, and movement), and computational modeling, we show how perception, belief, and prior expectations

Yoni, the first PhD to emerge from the lab, and his dissertation, The Stress-Sensitive Self, explored how stress shapes the cognitive, clinical, and physiological underpinnings of basic self-disturbances in early psychosis—combining virtual reality, computational modeling, and clinical phenomenology. The journey spanned, research, clinical training, and the occasional identity crisis (all in the name of science,

Lisa’s doctoral research focused on the early prediction of stress vulnerability in healthy adults and posttraumatic stress disorder in vulnerable populations, harnessing wearable sensors in real-life focusing on psycho-physiological functioning, in the hope that it will improve early detection and intervention.

Prof. Roy Salomon, together with Nova survivor Rita Yedid, was invited to speak at a special session at the United Nations focusing on trauma and resilience.In their talk, Prof. Salomon presented scientific insights into the psychological impact of trauma and the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying resilience, while Ms. Yedid shared her personal journey of survival and