Nadav Amir

Contemplative Computational Cognitive Science

How do our goals shape the way we experience, and learn from, our interactions with the world? My research focuses on elucidating the fundamental computational 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 of natural and artificial purposeful behavior, unified via the prism of goals.

I am currently a visiting fellow at the Fields Institute for Research in the Mathematical Sciences in Toronto. Previously, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, working with Dr. Angela Langdon (NIMH) and Prof. Yael Niv and before that I conducted research 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, working under the supervision of Prof. Naftali Tishby and Prof. Israel Nelken.