spiders2.jpgImagine that while reading these lines, a spider crawls on your desk. You might refer to it as small and harmless, while your spider phobic co-worker will probably perceive it as huge and intimidating. These kinds of situations highlight the importance in investigating the mechanisms that mediate size perception in different individuals. These situations also raise the question whether the pair of words “huge” and “intimidating” may represent more than a figure of speech. Namely, is bias in size perception related to the level of threat the stimulus possess? In this line of experiments we are trying to answer that question with both behavioral methods (estimation of the conceptual size of numbers relative to other animals’ size) and imaging methods (investigating the activation of the amygdala and primary visual cortex when encounter a threatening stimuli).
Lab members:
Tali Leibovich
 
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