Dr. Bergerbest Dafna
Fields of Research

School of Behavioral Sciences



Ambiguity Processing
Lexical Processing
Brain Lateralization
Aging Effects
Bodily Self-Consciousness
Multi-Sensory Integration
Sense of Body Ownership
Sense of Agency
Theory of Mind
Short Bio
Dafna Bergerbest, Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology, School of Behavioral Sciences, Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo. My recent work focuses on three major topics: (1) The cognitive processes underlying comprehension of ambiguous language, including disambiguation vs. ambiguation, bottom-up and top-down relationships between semantic, phonological and orthographic representations in ambiguous language, and effects of aging on brain lateralization of the relationships between these representations. (2) The cognitive processes underlying conscious experience, including effects of attention and memory on conscious experience and the multi-modality processes underlying sense of body ownership and sense of agency. (3) The cognitive and affective processes underlying controlled and automatic Theory of Mind abilities in adults.
Selected Publications
1. Heruti, V., Bergerbest, D., & Giora, R. (2019). A linguistic or pictorial context: Does it make a difference? Discourse Processes, 56(8), 748–763.
2. Peleg, O., Norman, T., & Bergerbest, D. (2018). Phonological effects in visual word recognition: Evidence from the processing of two types of Hebrew acronyms. Journal of Research in Reading, 41, S1-S11.
3. Bergerbest, D., Shilkrot, O., Joseph, M., & Salti, M. (2017). Right visual-field advantage in the attentional blink: Asymmetry in attentional gating across time and space. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 79, 1979-1992.
4. Peleg, O., Edelist, L., Eviatar, Z., & Bergerbest, D. (2016). Lexical factors in conceptual processes: The relationship between semantic representations and their corresponding phonological and orthographic lexical forms. Memory & Cognition, 44, 519-537.
5. Druker, A., Fein, O., Bergerbest, D., & Giora, R. (2014). On sarcasm, social awareness, and gender. Humor, 27(4), 551-573.
6. Givoni, S., Giora, R., & Bergerbest, D. (2013). How speakers alert addressees to multiple meanings. Journal of Pragmatics, 48, 29-40.