ד"ר עופר פרל – Dr. Ofer Perl
Email:
operl@psy.haifa.ac.il
Affiliation / Department:
Department of Cognitive Sciences
School of Psychological Sciences
Academic Background:
I am a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Cognitive Sciences.
After earning a B.Sc. in Biology from the Hebrew University, I received both my M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the Weizmann Institute of Science, where I studied human olfaction under Prof. Noam Sobel. My M.Sc. thesis focused on the effects of olfactory stimulation during sleep. I demonstrated that olfactory sensory information presented during sleep modulates oscillatory patterns in the brain without causing arousal and is associated with increases in slow EEG oscillations characteristic of deep sleep. During my Ph.D. (awarded 2019), I combined respiratory measurements with electroencephalography (EEG) to study the links between brain activity, cognitive performance, and breathing. My other interests lie in computational approaches to studying the multidimensional representations of odors in human perception.
I held a postdoctoral position at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, where I had a joint appointment with Prof. Daniela Schiller and Prof. Xiaosi Gu in the Neuroscience Department and the Center for Computational Psychiatry. Using neuroimaging and computational approaches, I studied neural representations of engineered beliefs in nicotine addiction and the hippocampal representations of traumatic autobiographical memories in post-traumatic stress disorder. I then took a postdoctoral position at ELSC with Dr. Aya Ben Yakov, where I investigated the hippocampal mechanisms underlying the encoding of episodic memories from real-life experiences.
Research interests:
Fascinated by the brain's ability to systematically map and organize everyday experience, my research group is pursuing the following lines of research:
- The formation of idiosyncratic sensory-cognitive maps, with the sense of smell providing a unique case for high-dimensional, nonspatial information.
- The role of multisensory integration in the transformation of naturalistic experience into hippocampal memory representations.
- The application of AI-powered language models to generate personalized narratives for investigating neural representations of autobiographical memory in both healthy individuals and those with memory-related disorders, such as PTSD.
Home Page URL:
www.oferperl.com