Lotem Elber-Dorozko
Lotem Elber-Dorozko is a post-doctoral researcher studying philosophy of the cognitive sciences. She collaborates with philosophers and scientists on research works at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive science. Her main focus is the methodologies used in the cognitive sciences. She investigates how properties that cannot be quantitatively measured, such as adaptiveness, function, and optimality, affect acceptance of models, and how scientific attitudes towards these properties aids or hinders scientific progress.
Before her time at the University of Pittsburgh she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Humanities and Arts at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where she discussed these questions with both scientists and philosophers.
She got her PhD in computational neuroscience in the Loewenstein lab for decision making, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her PhD investigated decision making from computational, behavioral, and philosophical perspectives.
Some representative papers include:
- Elber-Dorozko, L. and Loewenstein, Y. (2023). Do retinal neurons also represent somatosensory inputs? On why neuronal responses are not sufficient to determine what neurons do. Cognitive Science , 47: e13265. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13265.
- Elber-Dorozko, L. (in progress) Can neuroscientists ask the wrong questions? On why etiological considerations are essential when modeling cognition. http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/21706/
- Elber-Dorozko, L. and Shagrir, O. (2021). Integrating computation into the mechanistic hierarchy in the cognitive and neural sciences. Synthese 199 (Suppl 1), 43–66. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02230-9.
- Elber-Dorozko, L. and Loewenstein, Y. (2018). Striatal action-value neurons reconsidered. eLife, 7: e34248. https://elifesciences.org/articles/34248.