Niv Lab

Research in the Niv lab focuses on the neural and computational processes underlying reinforcement learning, decision making and their relationship to mental health.

We study the ongoing day-to-day processes by which we learn from trial and error, without explicit instructions, to predict future events and to act upon the environment so as to maximize reward and minimize punishment. For instance, we are interested in how people create mental representations of new tasks that make these task easy to solve. We also study how differences in cognitive processes of learning, memory, and decision making relate to mental health symptoms and whether individual differences in these cognitive processes can predict response to psychotherapy. [read more]


Important Note

If you received an email solicitation for an available position in my lab asking you to call a phone number to apply — that is a phishing attempt. We currently do not have positions available, and if we did, they would be advertised at https://hub-princeton.icims.com/ and would not involve calling by phone, or sending any information outside the formal application process on the Princeton website. 

A scammer is impersonating me, sending forged emails to students falsely advertising a position with lucrative pay, and obtaining information about them through a fake application process. Do not contact the scammer or give them personal information or money!

Lab News

March 2024: Congratulations to Oded Bein, whose paper titled: 'Event Integration and Temporal Differentiation: How Hierarchical Knowledge Emerges In Hippocampal Subfields through Learning' was published! 

February 2024: Congratulations to Dan-Mircea Mirea for giving a data blitz talk titled “Individuals with depression show heightened sensitivity to social media rewards” at the SPSP Psychology of Media & Technology Preconference 2024! Dan also gave a poster with the same title at the main SPSP conference.

December 2023: Goodbye Ellie, we will miss you! Good luck with the rest of grad school! Once finished, Ellie will join the lab once again as a postdoc. 

November 2023: Congratulations to Eleanor Holton, who won the 2023 Niv Lab Challenge!

October 2023: Congratulations to Rachel Bedder, Nadav Amir, Eleanor Holton, and Seohyun Moon, who presented at the Princeton Symposium on Biological and Artificial Intelligence! Rachel presented a poster on 'Rumination as State Inference', Nadav presented a poster on 'States as goal directed concepts', Eleanor presented a poster titled, 'Humans and neural networks show similar patterns of transfer and interference in a continual learning task', and Seohyun presented a poster on 'SWIN-based Subjective Well being Classification using fNIRS'.

October 2023: Congratulations to Gili Karni and Dan-Mircea Mirea for passing their Generals exams with flying colors!

September 2023: Welcome to Eleanor Holton (Ellie), who's visiting as a grad student from Oxford!

August 2023: Welcome to our three new RAs, Kepler Palacio-Soto, Jialing Ding and Seohyun Moon. We're excited to have you join us!

August 2023: Congratulations to our summer interns, Hollen Knoell, Isabella Fernandez, Julie Abaci, Andrea Mullin, and Andrew Kyo for completing their summer internships! We're excited to see what you do next and can't wait to see your posters!

August 2023: Goodbye to Nastasia, we will miss you! Good luck with grad school! 

July 2023: Congratulations to everyone who participated in the 2023 Computational Psychiatry Conference! Isabel Berwian gave a talk on 'Using computational models to understand psychotherapy interventions effects' and Yael Niv gave a tutorial on 'Reinforcement learning and bayesian approaches' and a keynote. Dan-Mircea Mirea presented a poster on 'Computational psychiatry in the wild: depression affects reinforcement learning on social media,' Sashank Pisupati presented a poster titled 'Real-world evaluation of a machine learning decision-support system for mental health assessments,' and Oded Bein presented a poster on 'The relationship between mental health symptoms and event segmentation.'

May 2023: Rachel Bedder's conference paper "Modelling Rumination as a State-Inference Process" will be presented as a talk at CogSci 2023 in Sydney in July! Congratulations Rachel, we're excited to see you share your work!

April 2023: Congratulations to Oded Bein, who presented a poster at LEARNMEM 2023, titled “Altered event segmentation in anxiety and schizotypy"!

March 2023: Rachel Bedder and Dan Mirea both presented at the Society for Affective Science conference! Rachel was part of the Reinforcement Learning as an Approach to Understanding Basic Affective Processes symposium, and presented a talk titled, "Modelling Rumination as a State Inference Process." Dan presented a flash talk, titled "Computational psychiatry in the wild: how depression affects reinforcement learning on social media." Congratulations to both!

December 2022: Congratulations to Sashank Pisupati at his new job at Limbic! We will miss you, and please come visit!

November 2022: Jamie Chiu has a poster at SfN Neuroscience 2022, titled "How does sadness influence effort-based decision making?"!

August 2022: Sev Harootonian will give a talk at CCN 2022, titled "The best advice you can give"! Sev will also present his work as a poster, and additionally received a travel grant for this conference. Congratulations Sev! We are excited to see you share this interesting work.

August 2022: We are excited to welcome Nastasia Klevak to the lab as the lab manager!

For news older than 2022, see the lab news archive.