Ifat Levy
Associate Professor of Comparative Medicine, Neuroscience, and Psychology
PhD, 2004, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
I am interested in the neural mechanisms that underlie human decision-making, especially under risk and uncertainty, and in the way individual differences in decision-making are reflected by the neural activation. My studies combine functional MRI methods from cognitive neuroscience and experimental methods from behavioral economics to study the neural correlates of decision parameters and valuation processes. Similar paradigms are used in healthy young volunteers, as well as in adolescents, older adults and obese individuals in order to unravel changes in behavior and in neural activation that may be at the core of pathological behaviors such as extreme risk-taking in adolescents and overeating in obese individuals.