DR. TAL GONEN (PhD)
Dr. Gonen is a researcher at the Sagol Brain Institute and the head of the translational neuroscientific lab in the Neurosurgical Department, Tel Aviv Medical Center. Her academic background includes a Bachelor's degree in Behavioral Sciences (Psychology, Sociology) from the Tel Aviv Academic College; followed by a PhD from the Behavioral-Cognitive Neuroscience program at the School of Psychological sciences, Tel Aviv University.
Dr. Gonen is the Leading Investigator of the #Neurosurgical Interfaces research team at the Sagol Brain Institute.
Research Projects
The effects of brain surgery for tumor removal on face recognition abilities
Three face processing tests are administered before and after surgery; offering a comprehensive assessment of patient face recognition abilities:
(A) A famous face recognition test - Reduced performance following surgery surgery would indicate that the face recognition mechanisms may have been harmed.
(B) Face matching from various viewpoints – used to assess the selectivity of the impairment (i.e. whether object recognition in general has been harmed, or just face recognition). Patients are asked to match unfamiliar faces in a frontal view, with one of three choices of faces in a 3/4 profile viewpoint. As a control, frontal and profile car images are used.
(C) Facial expression recognition task - In this task, a word describing an emotional state appears on the screen followed by three facial expressions, patients are asked to choose the facial expression that best depicts the emotion. The emotional states include both basic emotions (e.g., happy, sad) and complex emotions (e.g., embarrassment, shock, guilt) and therefore provide a sensitive recognition test of facial expression.