About

Hilla Jacobson’s research focuses on the philosophy of mind and cognitive science and the philosophy of practical reasoning. Much of her work stands at the point where philosophical concerns overlap with and feed into empirical research in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Jacobson is interested especially in the manner in which we consciously perceive and experience the world (including our own bodies); in the evaluative, valenced (pleasant/unpleasant), motivational (action-guiding) aspects of our perceptual experiences; and in the nature of – as well as the interplay between – mental elements that purport to represent how the world actually is (e.g., beliefs or judgments) and those that concern how it should be from the subject's perspective (e.g., desires and preferences).

Selected Publications

Jacobson, H. (2019). “Not only a messenger: towards an attitudinal-representational theory of pain”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 99 (2), 382-408.

Jacobson, H. forthcoming. The Role of Valence in Perception: An ARTistic Treatment, Philosophical Review

Jacobson H, Putnam H. 2016. “Against Perceptual Conceptualism”. International Journal of Philosophical Studies

About

Noam’s research is concerned with learning, reading, and their intersection, mostly from the prism of individual-differences. His most recent work deals primarily with how individuals differ from one another in their literacy skills given their learning capacities and the properties of their native language’s writing system. This work involves the development of computational tools to mathematically quantify the structure of writing systems, and the use of behavioral, eye-tracking, and neurobiological methods to unveil the computations available to learners as they assimilate this structure.

Selected Publications

Siegelman, N., Rueckl, J. G., Steacy, L. M., Frost, S. J., van den Bunt, M., Zevin, J. D., Seidenberg, M. S., Pugh, K. R., Compton, D. L., & Morris, R. D. (2020). Individual differences in learning the regularities between orthography, phonology and semantics predict early reading skills. Journal of Memory and Language.

Siegelman, N., Schroder, S., Acarturk, C., Alexeeva, S, Amenta, S., An, H., Bertram, R., Bondarini, R., Brysbaert, M., Chernova, D., Da Fonesca, S. M., Dirix, N., Duyck, W., Fella, A., Frost, R., Gattei, C., Kalaitzi, A., Kwon, N., Marelli, M., … Kuperman, V. (2022). Expanding horizons of cross-linguistic research on reading: The Multilingual Eye-movement Corpus (MECO). Behavior Research Methods.

Siegelman, N., van den Bunt, M., Lo, J. C. M., Rueckl, J. G., & Pugh, K. R. (2021). Theory-driven classification of individuals with and without reading difficulties using Bayesian latent-mixture models. NeuroImage.  

Siegelman, N., Bogaerts, L., Christiansen, M.H., & Frost, R. (2017). Towards a theory of individual differences in statistical learning. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Siegelman, N., & Frost, R. (2015). Statistical learning as an individual ability: Theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence. Journal of Memory and Language.

Selected Awards

2022-present: Azrieli Early Career Faculty Fellowship

2020-2021: Israel Science Foundation (ISF) postdoctoral fellowship

2018-2019: Rothschild Yad-Hanadiv postdoctoral fellowship

2019: Alex Berger award for an outstanding Ph.D. dissertation (Hebrew University)

Teaching

Courses taught in the last 5 years (B.A., M.A.)

2022-present: Statistics for Graduate Students: From t-tests to Mixed-Effect Models

2022-present: Field Work: Individual Differences in Learning and High-Level Cognitive Abilities

2022-present: Research Methods for Cognitive Sciences

2018: A Hands-on Tutorial: Mixed-effect Models in R

2015-2018: Research Methods for Cognitive Sciences