ARIEL BELINGER

Ariel is a PhD student in the lab, interested in conciseness, perception, semantic knowledge, computational neuroscience, and vision science. He aims to uncover the connection between knowledge activation and the experience of perceptual conciseness.

Ariel began his academic journey at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, where he earned a bachelor's degree in cognition and neuroscience with a minor in art. During this time, he worked in Claude Brodski's lab, researching the mechanisms of cell death in Parkinson’s disease. For his master’s studies, Ariel joined Prof. Roy Salomon's lab on conciseness and self at Haifa University. While in the lab, he contributed to several projects, including "Unreal," a large-scale reality monitoring paradigm set in virtual reality (VR), which evaluates whether the origin of incoming information is external to the self. He worked with healthy participants, children, and clinical populations. Ariel also contributed to the Nove project, focusing on survivors of the Nove attack and how different substances affect the onset of PTSD. His master’s thesis focused on pupillometry data and the classification of virtual hallucinations using the Unreal paradigm.

In his free time, Ariel enjoys hiking in nature and experimenting with new recipes in the kitchen. He’s also the go-to person for great book recommendations and running an engaging D&D game.