Nadav Amir

Contemplative Computational Cognitive Science

Our goals shape how we experience, and learn from, our interactions with the world. My research focuses on elucidating the principles underlying experience-based learning of purposeful behaviors. This poses formidable challenges to traditional research approaches, as goals are multifaceted, dynamic constructs interacting with a complex web of cognitive, affective, social, and environmental factors. I therefore pursue a transdisciplinary approach, using methods from behavioral neuroscience, reinforcement learning, control and information theory to formulate and test models of cognitition originating in non-Western (mainly Buddhist) thought and contemplative traditions. This allows me to draw connections between hitherto seemingly unrelated theoretical constructs, offering unifying explanatory frameworks for behavioral, phenomenological and neural data in terms of intrinsically motivated cognitive states. It further provides concrete steps towards a philosophically informed theoretical framework for studying agency and self-knowledge in natural and artificial agents. 

I am currently a research fellow at the University of Ottawa and at the Princeiples Of Intelligence, a non-profit interdiciplinary research organization with a focus on AI safety. Previously, I was a visiting fellow at the Fields Institute in Toronto, a postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and conducted empirical research in the High Level Cognition at Tel Aviv University. I obtained my PhD from the Edmond and Lilly Safra Center for Brain Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.