October 2024: Congratulations to Jamie Chiu and Branson Byers for passing their Generals exams!
September 2024: Welcome to Ella Tuominen, who is visiting us this semester and is a graduate student from UCL!
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 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!
July 2022: Congratulations to lab alum Isla Weber for the acceptance of her paper stemming from her Junior independent work in the lab! Not many undergrads publish their independent work — this is a testament to incredible amount of work and dedication that Isla poured into this project.
July 2022: We will be at CPC++ 2022! Dan Mirea will be giving a data blitz talk titled “Individual differences in latent-cause inference map onto transdiagnostic dimensions of mental health”. Jamie Chiu will present a poster titled “How does mood influence computations of cost and reward in effort-based decision making?” And our awesome undergrads Ines Aitsahalia and Sofiya Yusina will also be presenting posters! Ines will present on “Latent-cause inference under varying beliefs about randomness captures individual differences in fear extinction” while Sofiya Yusina will present on “Latent-cause inference: a new way to look at schizophrenia-spectrum disorders”.
June 2022: We look forward to RLDM 2022, and are excited for our lab members who will be sharing their work! Rachel Bedder will be running a workshop on Repetitive Negative Thinking and Simulation in Natural and Artificial Cognition with Peter Hitchcock and Paul Sharp. Call for Abstracts for short talks for this workshop is open until Wednesday 3rd May! In addition, Sashank Pisupati will present on “Why do some beliefs and action policies resist updating?” Dan Mirea will present on “Quantifying the latent-cause inference process and its relationship with mental health” and Gili Karni will present on “A Rational Information Gathering Account of Infant Exploratory Behavior”. Congratulations everyone!
May 2022: Congratulations to our graduating seniors: Ines Aitsahalia, Maddie Hare, Helen Wang, Nora Wolf, and Sofiya Yusina! Thank you for all your amazing work and contributions to the lab’s research. We wish you all the best in your future endeavors!
April 2022: We are excited to welcome Nadav Amir to the lab as a postdoc!
April 2022: Congratulations to Sev, Branson and Ines for their NSF Graduate Research Fellowship offers! You all have done amazing works and we can’t wait to see the exciting research you will do on this fellowship!
April 2022: We are going to SOBP in New Orleans! Oded Bein and Dan Mirea will be presenting, and we look forward to much stimulating discussion.
April 2022: Oded Bein will be presenting his work at the Priors, evidence, and memory: Dynamics of predictive processing (POEM) workshop in Germany!
April 2022: Congratulations to Angela Langdon as she is starting to her new lab at NIMH! So glad you are staying local for a bit more… we will sorely miss you around Princeton but are so excited for you! All the best and don’t forget to come visit us when you have the chance!
Mar 2022: We continue the long-time tradition of NivLab people (or alums) running the COSYNE undergraduate travel grant award mentoring program. Thank you to Sashank Pisupati for being the person on the groundrunning the program this year (together with Angela Langdon in spirit)
Mar 2022: Woohoo! Jaime Chiu and Branson Byers both accepted our offers and will be commencing their graduate studies at Princeton Psychology in the fall!
Mar 2022: Angela Langdon is back after maternity leave with her twins! Congratulations Angela and we are excited to have you back!
Mar 2022: We had a blast taking Liz Neeley’s 10-week scientific writing practicum with the Pena lab. Check out Liz’s website here!
Jan 2022: Welcome to Yongjing Ren who is joining the lab as a research assistant!
Dec 2021: Congratulations to Dr. Mingyu Song for successfully defending her thesis, completing her PhD, and starting her work at Facebook!
Oct 2021: Congratulations to the NivLab and especially Isabel Berwian for being awarded a Leap Wellcome grant to study precision psychiatry for treatment selection in anhedonic depression!
Aug 2021: Welcome to Gal Shoval who will be spending his two year sabbatical in Niv Lab!
July 2021: Welcome also to Jamie Chiu who is joining the lab as a research assistant! We are excited to have you here!
July 2021: We are excited to welcome Rachel Bedder to the lab as a postdoc. Welcome, Rachel!!
June 2021: We wish farewell & best of luck to Gina Choe, who is heading off to Georgetown University to start an MD/PhD. Yay!
June 2021: Congratulations to Angela Radulescu (who graduated from the lab a year ago) for getting an Assistant Professor position at Mt Sinai’s brand new Center for Computational Psychiatry! Woohoo!
May 2021: Congratulations to Bob Wilson, one of the first postdocs in the lab, who just got tenure at University of Arizona! Good job!
Apr 2021: Congratulations to Sam Gershman, first PhD student in the NivLab, back in 2008(!), for getting tenure at Harvard! Go Sam!
Mar 2021: Congratulations to Dan, Gili and Gina for doing so well on the PhD-interview circuit! Not that we are surprised, but always nice to see others recognize your awesomeness as well!
Feb 2021: Congratulations to Kelsey McDonald, former undergrad in the lab, on defending her thesis at Duke Institute for Cognitive Science. So proud of you! Check out Kelsey’s amazing work here, and here is a great starting point.
Jan 2021: Congratulations to Eran Eldar and Valkyrie Felso on their paper “A pupillary index of susceptibility to decision biases”, now published in Nature Human Behavior! Our first attempt at a registered report, this was quite a learning experience, not to mention a tour de force of running scores of subjects with eye tracking (thanks, Val!). And we may be breaking our own records of older work being published after many years – this project was one of Eran’s graduate work projects!
Dec 2020: We are so excited to have Oded Bein join the lab as a postdoc!
Oct 2020: We are excited to welcome Gili Karni as a research assistant in the lab!
September 2020: Special congratulations to Stephanie Chan and Nina Lopatina for submitting (and posting on bioRxiv) one of our oldest projects — the m&ms task that Nina, our first lab manager, started way back in 2009. It has gone through many iterations and versions, and Stephanie masterfully brought it to a finish even though she left the lab years ago! We are excited to have these findings out in the world.
August 2020: We bid sad but also excited farewell to Angela Radulescu, Nina Rouhani, Yeon Soon Shin and Dan Bennett. Sad because the lab will not be the same without you all, and excited because we can’t wait to see what you will do next, and we are looking forward to staying in touch. Good luck with your next steps!!
August 2020: Congratulations to Yeon Soon Shin and Sam Zorowitz on your (respective) weddings! We wish you fulfilling and supportive relationships that continue to bring out the best in you!
August 2020: Congratulations to Dr. Shin on successfully defending her thesis! Woohoo!
August 2020: Congratulations to Nicole for her primer in Current Biology!
June 2020: We gladly welcome Isabel Berwian to the NivLab!
May 2020: Congratulations to Drs. Radulescu and Rouhani on successfully defending their theses! Woohoo!
May 2020: Congratulations to Mingyu Song on her paper getting an oral presentation at CogSci!
May 2020: Congratulations to Angela Langdon on her paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences!
April 2020: We gladly welcome Gina Choe, Dan-Mircea Mirea and Sev Harootonian to the NivLab!
March 2020: Congratulations to Nina on her paper Reward prediction errors create event boundaries in memory being accepted to Cognition!
March 2020: Congratulations to Yeon Soon for being accepted to Molly Crocket’s lab at Yale for her postdoctoral fellowship!
March 2020: Congratulations to Nina for being accepted to Ralph Adolphs’s Emotion and Social Cognition lab at Caltech for her postdoctoral fellowship!
March 2020: Congratulations to Angela Radulescu for being awarded an NYU Center for Data Science Moore-Sloan Faculty Fellowship!
January 2020: Congratulations to Sarah DuBrow (former postdoc, now faculty at U Oregon) on winning a prestigious Sloan Fellowship! Woohoo!