$$News and Reports$$

Feb. 11, 2019

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The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation has awarded its prestigious Humboldt Research Award to Prof. Avishai Henik of BGU's Department of Psychology.

The €60,000 is awarded to researchers whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their academic disciplines and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future. It is intended to fund a year's research in Germany, which Prof. Henik will spend at the University of Freiburg researching attention and cognition with Prof. Andrea Kiesel. The scholars will, amongst other things, explore using the diameter of a patient's pupil as a measure of mental energy.

Prof. Henik, a neurocognitive psychologist, is one of the world's leading psychologists and experts in cognition and one of just three BGU researchers to be honored by the University as a Distinguished Professor. As a graduate student, his dissertation advisor was Nobel laureate Prof. Daniel Kahneman of Hebrew University. His research interests include numerical processing, attention, word processing, and synesthesia with the aim to elucidate the basic mental operations and brain structures involved in these processes.

He is the author of more than 250 scientific articles and has won many competitive research grants including awards from the Israel Science Foundation and the European Research Council.