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matan rubin

Comparing the value of perceived humanversus AI-generated empathy

16 July, 2025

new paper published in Nature Human Behaviour by Matan Rubin, Prof. Anat Perry, and colleagues, explores whether empathic responses are perceived differently when attributed to a human versus artificial intelligence.

Across nine studies with over 6,000 participants, the researchers found that identically generated empathic messages were rated as more empathic, supportive, and authentic when thought to come from a human.

oded leshem

Congratulation to Dr. Oded Adomi Leshem

2 July, 2025

Who won ISPP’s 2025 David O. Sears Best Book Award for his book "Hope Amidst Conflict: Philosophical and Psychological Explorations," Published by Oxford University Press.

Leshem is a senior researcher at the PICR lab and the founder of the new International Hub for Hope Research.

David O. Sears Best Book on Mass Politics Award

Amir Tal

Welcome Dr. Amir Tal

24 June, 2025

The Department of Psychology is excited to welcome Dr. Amir Tal, a new faculty member joining the department in collaboration with the Department of Cognitive Science and the Brain. Amir will join us in the upcoming academic year (2025–2026) and will lead the Computational Psychology cluster.

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Whale song shows language-like statistical structure

7 February, 2025
Whale song shows language-like statistical structure

All human languages follow a particular distribution of words known as the Zipf distribution. This distribution pertains to the frequency of relative word use and is believed to reflect cultural transmission of language. This pattern has also been found in infants during the beginnings of language production

Humpback whale song is a culturally transmitted behavior. Human language, which is also culturally transmitted, has statistically coherent parts whose frequency distribution follows a power law. These properties facilitate learning and may therefore arise because of their contribution to the faithful transmission of language over multiple cultural generations. If so, we would expect to find them in other culturally transmitted systems.

A new study of Prof. Inbal Arnon and others (published tonight in Sicence) applied methods based on infant speech segmentation to 8 years of humpback recordings, uncovering in whale song the same statistical structure that is a hallmark of human language. This commonality, in two evolutionarily distant species, points to the role of learning and cultural transmission in the emergence of properties thought to be unique to human language.

see full article here