Dr. Yael Niv

Biography

Yael Niv is a Professor at Princeton University and the Director of Graduate Studies at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. Her research focuses on the neural computational processes underlying reinforcement learning and decision-making. She studies the ongoing processes through which animals and humans learn through trial and error, using explicit instructions, predicting future events, and acting upon their environment to maximize rewards and minimize punishments. Niv's work emphasizes model-based experimentation, utilizing computational models to define precise hypotheses about data, design experiments, and analyze results. She is particularly interested in the interaction between attention and memory processes and reinforcement learning, and how these create representations that enable individuals to learn and solve new tasks efficiently. An emerging focus of her lab is computational cognitive neuropsychiatry, where the aim is to leverage computational tools to quantify dynamic behavioral processes to diagnose, understand, and treat psychiatric illnesses such as depression, OCD, schizophrenia, and addiction. Her lab's work is part of the new Rutgers-Princeton Center for Computational Cognitive Neuropsychiatry.

Research Interests