Yael Niv

Position
Professor, PNI & PSY and Director of Graduate Studies, Psychology
Role
Future Faculty Workshop Speaker
Bio/Description

Research in the Niv lab focuses on the computational processes underlying reinforcement learning and decision-making, and their relationship to mental health. We study the ongoing day-to-day processes by which people change their behavior through learning from the consequences of previous actions. In particular, we are interested in how attention and memory processes interact with reinforcement learning to create representations that allows us to learn to solve new tasks so efficiently. We are also interested in understanding how learning and decision making can affect mental health, and whether quantifying individual differences in these processes can help tailor psychotherapy treatments so as to deliver to people the precise treatment that will best help them.