Maayan Trzewik is a Bloom Postdoctoral Fellow working in collaboration with Dr. Niv Reggev at Ben-Gurion University. She earned her BA in Psychology and Musicology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and her MA and PhD in Social Psychology from Tel Aviv University. Her research explores how people perceive and understand others, focusing on the interplay between person perception and social concepts such as group affiliation, identity, and social power. In her current project, she investigates how rich visual input and group identity shape face memory in both autistic and neurotypical populations.

Renana Twito is a third-year Doctoral Candidate at the School of Developmental Diversity in Education, University of Haifa. She conducts her research jointly in the lab of Prof. Bat-Sheva Hadad and the lab of Dr. Sarit Szpiro. Renana received her Master's degree (M.A.) in Special Education in 2022, also within these labs. Her M.A. thesis focused on the updating of prior regarding facial expressions in autism. Renana's current doctoral research focuses on value-based decision-making in autism. This work examines attitudes toward risk and ambiguity, and the influence of context and social information on decision processes. She pays specific attention to developmental aspects, conducting comparisons between children and adults. Additionally, Renana is interested in perceptual and cognitive processes in minimally verbal autistic individuals.

My research focuses on sensory processing differences in Autism Spectrum Disorder. The aim of my research is to explore whether sensory processing differences in Autism can be characterized by their magnitude of capacity limitations that are known to be broader in autism compared to neurotypical individuals and associated with a wider sampling of sensory stimuli.

The aim of my research is to explore whether threatening stimuli presentation, in various visual tasks, affects basic pre-attentive perceptual processes. Using psychophysical and Bayesian principals I wish to examine the effects of negative arousal on perception, and whether an emotional state of trait anxiety mediates the influence of negatively valence stimuli on perception.

Dana investigates autism across perceptual, attentional, and socio-emotional/communication domains. Her work combines objective performance tasks (e.g., ANT and perceptual paradigms) with caregiver reported outcomes in prospective, real world cohorts to evaluate cognitive safety and functional impact. Current projects include studies of CBD rich medical cannabis in autistic children, aiming to generate evidence that can inform clinical decision making for families and practitioners.

Tal Lulav-Bash, I'm at the end of my Ph.D. studies in Brain & Cognitive Science at Ben-Gurion University. Visual perception, the mechanism underlying facial recognition among different populations: Typical adults, Typical children, Elderly adults, people diagnosed with autism, and those born with congenial prosopagnosia. I explore how face exposure (experience) affects our ability to recognize and distinguish between faces. I examine the effect of the "regression-to-average" phenomenon in various cases of visual perception of faces, using biases and calibrations known to affect perception (the other age effect and the other race effect).

Educational Psychologist, holding MA and BA degrees from the University of Haifa. Research focuses on ensemble perception processes in autism and other special populations. The methodology includes diverse analytical methods, such as sigmoid functions and drift-diffusion models 

Salman Sarkar is a PhD student at the University of Haifa, affiliated with The Cognitive Development Laboratory (Hadad’s lab) and the Visual Attention and Cognition Laboratory (Yashar’s lab). He graduated from the University of Hyderabad and holds an Integrated MSc in Optometry and Vision Science. Salman investigates how the timing of visual experience influences perceptual mechanisms (natural priors (e.g., the oblique effect), depth cues integration, and cross-modal recalibration) by studying individuals with congenital and developmental cataracts.  His research is conducted in collaboration with Aravind Eye Hospital in India, where he has access to a unique population of individuals with varying degrees of visual impairment. The impact of onset, duration, and type of deprivation on learning provides valuable insights into sensitive periods in neural development, during which sensory experience shapes the brain’s perceptual systems. This enhances the understanding of neural plasticity and informs therapeutic approaches for individuals with visual impairments.

Speech-Language Therapist and Audiologist, BA in Communication Disorders, and currently pursuing a Master’s degree. Professionally engaged in clinical work with children on the autism spectrum, focusing on communication and language development. Research interests center on sensory learning and temporal perception in autism, examined through time reproduction tasks in auditory and visual modalities.

I am currently in an accelerated program, completing my bachelor‘s degree in Therapy, Counselling, Human Development & Special Education, while starting my master’s in Autism and Developmental disabilities. I’m involved in studies investigating face perception in Autism and Prosopagnosia, including carrying out scientific prosopagnosia diagnosis. I plan to explore and study this topic in my master’s thesis, under the supervision of Prof. Bat-sheva Hadad and Dr. Marissa Hartston. In addition, I am part of the SPARC management team, a center that combines research with special communities.

Speech and Language Therapist (SLT) with 16 years of clinical experience within the field of Autistic Spectrum Disorders. My expertise lies in the field of non-verbal communication, Alternative Communication Systems and assessment of Autism. I am qualified to carry out the ADOS assessment and have been involved in many research projects through ADOS evaluations. I study face processing in individuals diagnosed with ASD. Specifically my studies track the developmental trends in the interactive relations of the perception of facial identity and facial expressions, both in typically developing children and in those diagnosed with autism.

Laurina Fazioli is a research associate in the School of Developmental Diversity in Education and a post-doctoral researcher in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Haifa. She completed her B.A. in Psychology and M.A. in Research in Clinical Neurosciences and Neuropsychology at the University Grenoble Alpes, in France. She completed her Ph.D. in 2025 in Hadad’s and Yashar’s lab. In her Ph.D. research, she investigated perceptual decision-making in autism spectrum disorder using an integrative framework combining behavioral tasks, computational models, and psychophysics. Her current research in the lab focuses on the mechanisms underlying atypical perception in autism. Specifically, she investigates whether and how long- and short-term contextual information (i.e., priors) affects the way autistic and non-autistic individuals engage with their environment.

Undergraduate student in Psychology. Research assistant in a research group focused on the Cross - Modal perception.