Prof. Ackerman’s research is based on the metacognitive approach, by which subjective assessment of knowledge guides the activities people perform for achieving their goals. Understanding the factors that affect the reliability of this subjective knowledge assessment and the cases that are particularly prone to biases offers a foundation for developing effective work environments and techniques. In her recent research, she deals with the metacognitive processes underlying the regulation of mental effort while facing reasoning and problem-solving challenges, by combining cognitive-psychology experiments and real-life challenges.

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Marc Brettler is the Bernice and Morton Lerner Professor of Judaic Studies at Duke University, and Dora Golding Professor of Biblical Studies emeritus at Brandeis University. His research centers on several areas: the use of religious metaphors in the Hebrew Bible (God is King: Understanding an Israelite Metaphor, 1989), the nature of biblical historical texts as "literary" texts (The Creation of History in Ancient Israel, 1995; The Book of Judges, 2002), and gender and the Bible. He co-edited The Jewish Annotated New Testament (2011) and The New Oxford Annotated Bible (2001, revised 2010), co-authored The Bible and the Believer (2012; paperback 2015), wrote Biblical Hebrew for Students of Modern Hebrew (2002) and co-edited The Jewish Study Bible (2004; second edition 2014), which was awarded a National Jewish Book Award. How to Read the Bible was published by the Jewish Publication Society in fall 2005, and in paperback as How to Read the Jewish Bible by Oxford University Press in 2007. His articles may be found at https://duke.academia.edu/MarcBrettler.

Prof. Edward Breuer is a native of Montreal Canada and received his Ph.D. from Harvard; he currently teaches at the Hebrew University. Breuer writes about the history of biblical scholarship in the modern era, and is the co-author with Chanan Gafni of “Jewish Biblical Scholarship between Tradition and Innovation” and, with David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn's Hebrew Writings (Yale, 2018).

Klaus Fiedler is a Full Professor of Psychology, affiliated to Heidelberg University. He is a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Science and of the German National Academy of Science, Leopoldina, a member of various international science associations, and a Principal Investigator several science awards and almost 40 successful research proposals. Although his sphere of research is broad and varied, ranging from social cognition, communication of language, stereotyping, lie detection, and affective influences to methodology and translational research in law, over the last decade his work has more and more concentrated on judgment and decision making, anchored in a cognitive-ecological perspective on adaptive cognition. Central to this research area is his work on meta-cognitive myopia, conceived as a major obstacle in the way of rational decision making and action.

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Professor Handley’s research focuses on the psychology of reasoning and the interplay between logic and beliefs in rational judgment. Whilst on the one hand, people regularly achieve goals that depend upon adherence to logical principles and rational thought, they simultaneously often fail to solve even the simplest of cognitive puzzles, relying instead on heuristics that draw upon beliefs or similar associative processes. In his most recent research, Professor Handley has developed a range of experimental techniques that appear to paint a more optimistic picture of human judgment, one in which reasoners show an intuitive appreciation of logical structure. His work suggests that people are influenced by the logical validity of arguments even in the absence of explicit instruction to attend to these features. A key challenge remains in identifying the processes the underpin intuitive logic and mapping the extent to which reasoners show awareness of this influence on their thinking.

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The combination of experimental petrology and thermodynamic modeling provides powerful insights into the igneous and metamorphic processes by which Earth and other planets evolved.  My research involves the development of experimental techniques together with modeling of the experimental data to constrain the nature of both terrestrial and extraterrestrial environments through the study of synthetic analogs. 

Prof. Wim De Neys is a Research Director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and is affiliated with the LaPsyDE lab at the University of Paris. His research focuses on the interaction between intuitive and deliberate thought processes in human judgment, reasoning, and decision-making.

University of Haifa, Department of Archaeology and Zinman Institite of Archaeology