ABOUT

Welcome to the laboratory for visual perception and action directed by Tzvi Ganel at Ben Gurion University of the Negev.

Our lab studies visual perception and control of actions using diverse methods including online movement tracking, fMRI and behavioral studies.
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Visual control of action constitutes a fundamental ability that allows people and other organisms to interact with their visual environments. Visual perception of objects, on the other hand, allows people to identify objects in their visual environment. Current models of visual perception propose that those two visual functions are neuroanatomically dissociable. My main areas of research include studying visual perception in general, and more specifically, exploring the potential differences between visual perception and visually-guided action using behavioral methods as well as using fMRI.
An ongoing research in my perception-action lab is being focused on how visual perception and visually-guided action differ from one another using established psychophysical and behavioral tools such as testing those two systems under different contexts that emphasize configural processing, numerical magnitude, and visual illusions.  A central research direction in my lab is related to the question of whether action and perception differ from one another in how they relate to basic psychophysical principals.  A relevant example is that of Weber's law, a fundamental perceptual principle according to which visual resolution linearly increases with stimuli size. We recently showed, using classic behavioral methods, is that while resolution for stimulus size behaves according to Weber's when visual perception is involved, Weber's law does not characterize the control of visually-guided action in a task in which participants were asked to grasp various objects that differed in length (Ganel, Chajut, & Algom, 2008, Current Biology)