Prof. Liad Mudrik

Prof. Mudrik is an alumnus of the interdisciplinary program for outstanding students. She received two PhD degrees, in cognitive neuroscience (TAU & HUJI) and in philosophy (TAU). The latter was awarded with the Robert J. Glushko prize for outstanding dissertations in cognitive science. She then continued to work as a postdoctoral fellow at the division of biology at the California Institute of Technology, and joined the school of psychological sciences as a faculty member in 2015. She is a member of the Israel Young Academy of Sciences. 

Prof. Mudrik studies high-level cognition and its neural substrates, focusing on conscious experience, mostly using electrophysiological and behavioral methods. The main research questions are: (a) what are the neural substrates of consciousness, and how can we arbitrate between theories of consciousness; (b) what are the functions of consciousness, trying to identify processes that could be performed in the absence of awareness, vs. those that require conscious processing; (c) what is the role of conscious experience in volitional action, a question which taps into the long-lasting 'Free will' debate; and (d) how is the content of our conscious experiences affected by our knowledge, expectations and cognitive state.

Selected publications:

1. Cogitate Consortium, Ferrante, O., Gorska-Klimowska, U., Henin, S., Hirschhorn, R., Khalaf, A., Lepauvre, A., Liu, L., Richter, D., Vidal, Y., Niccolò, B., Brown, T., Sripad, P., Armendariz, M., Bendtz, K., Ghafari, T., Hetenyi, D., Jeschke, J., Kozma, C., Mazumder, D.R., Montenegro, S., Seedat, A., Sharafeldin, A., Yang, S., Baillet, S., Chalmers, D.J., Cichy, R.M., Fallon, F., Panagiotaropoulos, T.I., Blumenfeld, H., de Lange, F.P., Devore, S., Jensen, O., Kreiman, G., Luo, H., Boly, M., Dehaene, S., Koch, C., Tononi, G., Pitts, M., Mudrik, L., and Melloni, L. (2025) Adversarial testing of global neuronal workspace and integrated information theories of consciousness. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08888-1

Schreiber, M., Stockart, F. & Mudrik, L. (2025). The UnconTrust Database for Studies of Unconscious Semantic Processing and Attentional Allocation. Scientific data. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04465-3

Bayne, T., Seth, A. K., Massimini, M., Shepherd, J., Cleeremans, A., Fleming, S. M., Malach, R., Mattingley, J. B., Menon, D. K., Owen, A. M., Peters, M. A. K., Razi, A., & Mudrik, L. (2024). Tests for consciousness in humans and beyond. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2024.01.010

Mudrik, L., Hirschhorn, R. & Koriski, U. (2024). Taking consciousness for real: Increasing the ecological validity of the study of conscious vs. unconscious processes.  Neuron. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2024.03.031

Yaron, I., Melloni, L. Pitts, M. & Mudrik, L. (2022) The ConTraSt database for analyzing and comparing empirical studies of consciousness theories.Nature Human Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01284-5

Melloni, L., Mudrik, L., Pitts, M., and Koch, C. (2021) Making the hard problem of consciousness easier. Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.abj3259

For a full list of publications, see lab website : https://people.socsci.tau.ac.il/mu/mudriklab/publications