Avishai Henik

Henik was the instigator and chair of a multidisciplinary think-tank, sponsored by the Israeli Ministry of Education, whose function was to better understand the cross roads where neuroscience, cognitive science and education meet. The aim was to identify developments in the field and the ramifications for education. Henik was also supported by the ISF in the framework of a Center of Excellence for the study of numerical cognition. At the time, this center was the only one in Psychology that was awarded funding since Humanities and Social Sciences were added to the Centers of Excellence program in 2000. In 2012, Henik won a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Researcher Grant, which is awarded to allow exceptional, established research leaders to pursue ground-breaking, high-risk projects that open new directions in their research field. Henik's ERC grant was awarded to study the role of size perception and evaluation in numerical cognition. The main methods involved in this research include behavioral studies dealing with typical and atypical development of numerical concepts, imaging studies, work on lower animals (i.e., Archer fish, who are able to evaluate sizes but who do not have a cerebral cortex, which is thought to be central in arithmetic) and examination of computational aspects of development through evolutionary algorithms.

Henik began as a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 1979 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1984, then to associate professor in 1992 and to a full professor in 1996. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev endowed him with the Zlotowski Chair in Cognitive Neuropsychology in 1999 and a Distinguished Professor degree in 2014. He is currently continuing his research as an emeritus distinguished professor.

Henik started his work on attention under the supervision of Daniel Kahneman in the middle of the 1970s. Kahneman and Henik published two papers on selective attention, one of which has been heavily cited throughout the years. Since then, Henik studied the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie orienting of visual-spatial attention and selective attention. Studies conducted in his laboratory and in collaboration with other researchers (e.g., Robert Rafal) documented the distinction between the involuntary-exogenous and the voluntary-endogenous attentional systems, the cortical and subcortical neural structures that subserve these systems, and developmental trajectories in attention. His studies, on patients as well as the Archer fish, documented the role of subcortical structures (e.g., superior colliculus) in inhibition of return (IOR). His research on selective attention uses a range of tasks like the Stroop, flanker, and the stop-signal task, which require selection and control over habitual responding. This research led Henik to study cognitive control and executive functions.

Avishai Henik was born in Tel Aviv in 1945. He received his undergraduate degree in psychology and education from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 1971. He then moved to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to study for his MA and PhD degrees under the supervision of Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman. He received his PhD in 1979. In 1980, Henik received a Rothschild post-doctoral fellowship and spent two years in Eugene, Oregon, in the laboratory of Michael I. Posner, considered a leading pioneer in building the field of cognitive neuroscience, and the neuropsychology laboratory led by Michael I. Posner and Oscar S.M. Marin in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.