Anat Perry
Anat Perry is a psychologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who works on empathy and social cognitive neuroscience. On the 2020 shared-attention study this site relies on, she is the senior and corresponding author, which means the lab and the correspondence were hers. The first author is Noam Mairon, and the finding should be cited as his. That distinction is worth stating plainly, because senior authors are routinely credited with work that first authors led, and the drift is nearly always towards the better-known name.
Who they are
Perry is an associate professor in the psychology department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and directs the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab there. She completed her doctorate at the Hebrew University under Shlomo Bentin, on the brain mechanisms that let people understand others, and did postdoctoral work with Simone Shamay-Tsoory at the University of Haifa and with Robert T. Knight at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. The Berkeley connection is why the 2020 shared-attention study was run there, with Knight as a co-author and Berkeley undergraduates as participants.
Her research programme is about empathy: how accurately people read what someone else is feeling, what the brain is doing while they do it, and how the answer changes with the channel through which the other person reaches them. A recurring design in her lab has people recount real experiences and rate what they felt, then plays those accounts to others in different forms, video, audio, text, and measures how well the second group recovers the first group's feeling. That is a useful adjacent programme for a publication interested in mediated experience, because it treats the medium as a variable rather than as a neutral pipe.
Her relevance to the prime-time argument is narrower and specific. As senior author on Mairon and colleagues (2020) she is behind the most careful objective test of the claim that attending to something together amplifies attention and memory. The study found no such amplification, with Bayes factors between 0.13 and 0.64 supporting the null, and its one reliable social effect ran the other way: participants counted more accurately alone than together. The paper is also careful about its own limits, and those limits are hers as much as anyone's. No subjective measure was collected, so the study says nothing about how shared attention feels, and the amplification findings it was tested against, Garriy Shteynberg's, concern self-reported emotion under mediated co-presence rather than the objective performance measures used here. That is a well-marked scope statement rather than a hedge, and it is the reason this site treats the question as open on feeling and closed on performance.
Key papers
Perry's published record is substantially larger than the single paper cited here, and centres on empathy and social cognition rather than on shared attention. Only the paper this site relies on is listed, because a page that lists work it has not read is a page that cannot be checked.
Mairon, N., Nahum, M., Stolk, A., Knight, R. T. & Perry, A. (2020), "Behavioral and EEG Measures Show no Amplifying Effects of Shared Attention on Attention or Memory," Scientific Reports, 10, 8458, published 21 May 2020. Perry is senior and corresponding author; Mairon is first author.
Key ideas
Empathic accuracy is channel-dependent: how well one person recovers another's feeling changes with the medium carrying it.
Shared attention, measured objectively and under physical co-presence, does not amplify attention or memory. Her lab produced the strongest test of that.
The 2020 study's scope is stated by its authors rather than reconstructed by critics: performance measured, feeling not measured, no direct replication of the mediated-co-presence findings claimed.
Senior authorship is not first authorship. The finding belongs to Mairon, and this site cites it that way.
Concepts on this site
Find them elsewhere
The Bluesky account is linked from her Harvard Radcliffe fellow page and states her Hebrew University post, and the Scholar profile gives the same affiliation. Her lab site is at perrylab.huji.ac.il. No X or LinkedIn account could be confirmed
Checked 2026-09-10. Handles and affiliations go out of date, so treat this block as a snapshot rather than a standing fact.
Sources
- Mairon, N., Nahum, M., Stolk, A., Knight, R. T. & Perry, A. (2020), "Behavioral and EEG Measures Show no Amplifying Effects of Shared Attention on Attention or Memory," Scientific Reports, 10, 8458. Full text read.
- Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Perry's departmental page. Position, lab directorship, doctoral and postdoctoral training.
- Shteynberg, G. (2015), "Shared Attention," Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(5), 579-590.