Welcome!

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. 

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If you are looking for a research position, the Niv Lab is currently quite full and we are not actively searching for students, and we have no openings for research assistants. We are expecting to have an opening for a postdoc starting fall 2025.
You can read our FAQ here.

Lab News

August 2024
Woohoo! Our new Conte Center on Understanding Latent Cause Inference in Health and Illness is officially awarded! This is a joint Center involving 10 faculty at Princeton and Rutgers Universities, to study the role of latent cause inference in mental health, with Yael as Director of the Center.
August 2024
We will miss you Kepler, good luck!!
July 2024
We are excited to welcome Deepta Chandrasekhar as our lab manager!
May 2024
Congratulations to Dr. Oded Bein for starting his new position as Faculty of Psychology in Psychiatry at Weill-Cornell Medical School! We will miss you…
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 …
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 …
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!
Lab News Archive