Jobs in the UK
After CMU, I took on my first academic job as a lecturer in psychology at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Following up on Christof’s hypothesis about the role of (40 Hz) neural synchrony on visual binding, I set up (together with my Kent colleague Nick Donnelly) to test this via a psychophysical experiment. Three years later I moved to Birkbeck College, University of London, where I stayed until 2008 (in 2006 I was made a Chair in Cognitive Psychology; see PDF of Inaugural talk here). At Birkbeck I supervised my first 4 PhD students: Eddy Davelaar (now lecturer at Birkbeck), Samuel Cheadle (paper on the impact of subliminal 50Hz modulation on selective attention), Konstantinos Tsetsos (now postdocs at the University of Oxford) and Anat Elhalal (Computational psychologist). Together with Eddy and my CMU colleague Henk Haarman and with my TAU colleague Yonatan Goshen-Gottstein we were interested in capacity limitation in memory, and we tried to rescue the classical dual-store Long/Short-term memory model from a premature dismissal. Among other things, I took a go at the challenge of Free-Will and Agency.
In 2001, I married Iris, and our children, Noam and Talia (twins) were born in 2006. We all love London (the most beautiful city for us), especially the Hampstead/Belsize-Park area and the Heath, and we try to visit every summer.
, Noam Talia
A trip to the Alps, together with my late Caltech friend, Jorg Krammer. Jorg was a passionate hiker; unfortunately he died of thirst in a DeathValey hike (unlike some of us, he will remain young forever).
With friends (Ariel and Nick) at our London house. The bottle must be tequila, and the discussion must have been of some philosophical nature.