The Niv Lab focuses on several distinct and inter-related lines of research related to understanding the computational basis of learning and decision making in the brain. We use behavior – and sometimes neural data – to constrain computational models of how experience changes future decisions and choices (i.e., learning), and we apply this understanding to understanding mental health conditions and tailoring their treatment.
We are looking for a new lab manager/research assistant! If you are interested, please apply here. We are currently not recruiting postdocs, and graduate student recruitment season is over for the coming fall. Also: the CCNP is searching for a new clinical research coordinator! This is a long-term position (at least 2 years) with significant clinical (mental health) training, suitable for people with a BA or MA degree who are looking to be involved in cutting-edge research on mental health conditions. If you are interested, apply here. You can read our FAQ here.
Congratulations to our summer interns, Charlotte Bell, Luke Cho, Micaela Fernandez, and Lynne Abraham for completing their summer internships! We’re excited for what you do next!
Congratulations to Gili Karni, whose submission “How goals affect information seeking” was selected for a talk at the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci) 2025 conference! 🎉
We bid a bittersweet farewell to our postdocs — Rachel Bedder, Nadav Amir, and Isabel Berwian. The lab will truly miss you, but we are so excited to see all that you accomplish next. Wishing you the best of luck!
Congratulations to Branson Byers, Jamie Chiu, Dan-Mircea Mirea, and Yael Niv, for their poster presentations at RLDM 2025! RLDM also brought together past, present, and future members of the Niv Lab, who reconnected over a lovely dinner. Sweet!
Many congratulations to Jamie Chiu who presented at the ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (ETRA) 2025. We are proud to announce that Jamie received the Best Student Late Breaking Work award for her submission titled, Emotions Shape Effort-Reward Choices: Positive Valence Decreases Effort, Except Under High Arousal!
Many congratulations to Charlotte Bell, Allen Nieva, and Anna Benzeevi for their fantastic achievements! Allen has secured a paid internship at Purdue University this summer, Charlotte has received funding from both the Psychology department and the Cognitive Science fellowship for her thesis project on support-seeking preferences in depression, and Anna was selected for a summer internship at the Rutgers-Princeton Center for Computational Cognitive Neuro-Psychiatry (CCNP)! Yay!!
We're proud to congratulate Dan-Mircea Mirea for his series of achievements! He is a Graduate Fellow at Data-Driven Social Science for the spring semester, has been awarded the Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Honorific Fellowship, which “recognizes students in their later years of study for outstanding academic performance and professional promise,” and has won the Psychology of Technology Network Dissertation Award. Wow!
Kudos to Isabel Berwian and Dan-Mircea Mirea who participated in the Society for Affective Science Conference 2025! Isabel presented her work on ‘Using computational modeling to uncover the mechanism underlying spontaneous recovery after fear extinction’ and Dan presented a flash talk on ‘Semantic similarity between clients and therapists predicts alliance and treatment outcomes in large-scale digital psychotherapy'.
Congratulations to Dan-Mircea Mirea who participated at the SPSP annual meeting and presented his work titled “Depression is associated with heightened sensitivity to social media rewards”!
