Biography

Ayelet Landau received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2010 in the Cognition Brain and Behaviour Program of the Department of Psychology. Her Ph.D. work characterised the mechanisms and circuits of visual spatial attention. After her Ph.D., she joined the Ernst Struengmann Institute for Neuroscience in cooperation with the Max Planck Society in Frankfurt, Germany, as a postdoctoral fellow. At the end of 2014, she joined the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she founded the Brain Attention and Time Laboratory. 

Throughout her career, she has investigated cognitive functions that are both anchored in perceptual and system-specific abilities, but also require domain-general integration within and between neural networks. Over the past decade, she has focused on understanding how neural oscillations and rhythmic temporal structure in behaviour facilitate perceptual and attentional functions, and has pioneered the development of methods to measure rhythmic temporal structure in ongoing perceptual processes. In addition to psychophysics, she seeks to decipher the neural underpinnings of human cognition using non-invasive physiology (EEG/MEG). Since establishing her independent group, she has worked to generalise the biological models of attention and time perception both in vision and in different brain systems (action, tactile and auditory modalities).

Project Abstract

Time underlies all our activities and perceptions. Yet our knowledge of time perception remains limited. It is hampered by a division between psychological and behavioral findings on the one hand, and neuroscientific findings on the other. The former rarely address biological constraints, while the latter rarely inform a unified theory of time. The project aims to develop a theoretical framework that is informed by experimental work on time illusion and time estimation. This theoretical work will provide a much-needed taxonomy in the ongoing search for the neural basis of time perception.

Curriculum vitae

Since 2014

Associate Professor (as of 2020, previously Senior Lecturer) and Laboratory Director of the Brain Attention and Time Group, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

2010-2014 

Postdoctoral Fellow, ESI for Neuroscience in cooperation with the Max Planck Society, Frankfurt

2004-2010 

Ph.D. in Psychology, UC Berkeley, CA. 

2001-2004 

M.A. in Clinical Neuropsychology, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

1998-2001 

B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Selected Publications

2020 with Flor Kusnir, Slav Pesin and Gal Moscona. "When Temporal Certainty Doesn't Help." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 32 (2), 315–325. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_01482

2019 with Shany Grossman, Chen Gueta, Slav Pesin and Rafael Malach. "Where Does Time Go When You Blink?" Psychological Science 30 (6), 907–916. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619842198 

2019 with Daniele Re, Maya Inbar and Craig G. Richter. "Feature-Based Attention Samples Stimuli Rhythmically." Current Biology 29 (4), 693–699.e4. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.01.010 

2018. "Neuroscience: A Mechanism for Rhythmic Sampling in Vision." Current Biology 28 (15), R830-R832. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.05.081 

2016 with Sophie K Herbst. "Rhythms for Cognition: the case of temporal processing." Current Opinions in Behavioral Sciences 8, 85-93. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2016.01.014

2012 with Pascal Fries. "Attention Samples Stimuli Rhythmically." Current Biology, 22 (11), 1000-4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.03.054