nadav amir

How do our goals shape the way we experience, and learn from, our interactions with our environment? My research focuses on elucidating the fundamental computational principles underlying experience-based learning of purposeful behaviors. This poses formidable challenges to traditional, unidisciplinary research approaches, as goals are multifaceted, dynamic constructs interacting with a complex web of cognitive, emotional, social, and environmental factors. I therefore pursue a transdisciplinary approach, harnessing tools from diverse fields such as behavioral neuroscience, reinforcement learning, control and information theory to formulate and test ideas inspired by Eastern and Western philosophy of mind and contemplative traditions. This allows me to draw connections between hitherto seemingly unrelated theoretical constructs, offering novel perspectives for interpreting behavioral, phenomenological and neural data in terms of intrinsically motivated cognitive states. It further provides concrete steps towards a philosophically informed theoretical framework of natural and artificial learning, unified via the prism of goals.

I am currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, working with Dr. Angela Langdon (NIMH) and Prof. Yael Niv. Previously I was a postdoc in the High Level Cognition Lab of Prof. Liad Mudrik at Tel Aviv University. I obtained my PhD from the Edmond and Lilly Safra Center for Brain Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, under the supervision of Prof. Naftali Tishby and Prof. Israel Nelken.