The Cognition Emotion Interaction (CEI) Lab
Hadas Okon-Singer

This project focuses on the role of fear in hierarchical processing of fear-relevant information, and suggests that fear facilitates identification of an animal’s global configuration and interferes with identification of its local features. For example, fear of snakes is associated with faster identification of a snake in the grass, but with slower identification of the snake's type based on its body pattern. Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science , https://doi.org/

The role of attention bias in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety disorders has been studied extensively over decades. Attention bias reflects maladaptation in cognitive processing, as perceived threatening stimuli receive prioritized processing even when they are task-irrelevant or factually unthreatening. Recently, there has been some interest in the role of a-priori expectancies in attention bias toward threat. The present series of studies examines the causal interact