Yael Niv | |
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Occupation(s) | Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience |
Awards |
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Academic background | |
Alma mater | Tel-Aviv University; Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Princeton University |
Yael Niv is a neuroscientist who studies human and animal reinforcement learning and decision making. She is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton University. [1] Niv is known for her research contributions and for her visible advocacy work fighting against gender bias in neuroscience. [2] Niv is founder of biaswatchneuro.com,a website that tracks statistics in an effort to combat sexism in science. [3]
Niv was the recipient of the 2015 National Academy of Sciences Troland Research Award, [4] and the 2012 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. [5] She was a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2010 [6] and an Ellison Medical Foundation Scholar in 2011. [7]
Niv completed a Master of Arts degree at Tel-Aviv University in 2001. Her Master's thesis,was supervised by Daphna Joel and Eytan Ruppin and titled Evolution of Reinforcement Learning in Uncertain Environments. [8] Niv received a Ph.D in Neuroscience at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2008,where she worked under the supervision of Peter Dayan [9] on studies of behavioral control. [10] Her dissertation was titled The Effects of Motivation on Habitual Instrumental Behavior. [11]
After a post-doctoral fellowship at Princeton,Niv joined the faculty of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Psychology Department in 2008. [1]
Niv investigates the neural and computational processes underlying reinforcement learning—the ongoing day-to-day processes by which we learn from trial and error to maximize reward and minimize punishment. [12] She studies signals in the brain that may reflect dual-control mechanisms underlying decision making,including an attention system in the prefrontal cortex and a reinforcement learning system in the basal ganglia. [13] [14] Niv is interested in normative explanations of behavior and in developing neurocognitive models that offer principled explanations of brain mechanisms and their underlying computational algorithms. She asks in what sense,if at all,neurocomputational algorithms yield optimal decisions. From her perspective,the main goal of computational neuroscience is not to simulate the system,but rather to understand what higher-level computations are instantiated in the brain,and the functionality of these neural computations. [15]
The striatum or corpus striatum is a nucleus in the subcortical basal ganglia of the forebrain. The striatum is a critical component of the motor and reward systems;receives glutamatergic and dopaminergic inputs from different sources;and serves as the primary input to the rest of the basal ganglia.
Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition,with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental processes. It addresses the questions of how cognitive activities are affected or controlled by neural circuits in the brain. Cognitive neuroscience is a branch of both neuroscience and psychology,overlapping with disciplines such as behavioral neuroscience,cognitive psychology,physiological psychology and affective neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience relies upon theories in cognitive science coupled with evidence from neurobiology,and computational modeling.
The nucleus accumbens is a region in the basal forebrain rostral to the preoptic area of the hypothalamus. The nucleus accumbens and the olfactory tubercle collectively form the ventral striatum. The ventral striatum and dorsal striatum collectively form the striatum,which is the main component of the basal ganglia. The dopaminergic neurons of the mesolimbic pathway project onto the GABAergic medium spiny neurons of the nucleus accumbens and olfactory tubercle. Each cerebral hemisphere has its own nucleus accumbens,which can be divided into two structures:the nucleus accumbens core and the nucleus accumbens shell. These substructures have different morphology and functions.
Dopaminergic pathways in the human brain are involved in both physiological and behavioral processes including movement,cognition,executive functions,reward,motivation,and neuroendocrine control. Each pathway is a set of projection neurons,consisting of individual dopaminergic neurons.
Motivational salience is a cognitive process and a form of attention that motivates or propels an individual's behavior towards or away from a particular object,perceived event or outcome. Motivational salience regulates the intensity of behaviors that facilitate the attainment of a particular goal,the amount of time and energy that an individual is willing to expend to attain a particular goal,and the amount of risk that an individual is willing to accept while working to attain a particular goal.
Temporal difference (TD) learning refers to a class of model-free reinforcement learning methods which learn by bootstrapping from the current estimate of the value function. These methods sample from the environment,like Monte Carlo methods,and perform updates based on current estimates,like dynamic programming methods.
The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is a prefrontal cortex region in the frontal lobes of the brain which is involved in the cognitive process of decision-making. In non-human primates it consists of the association cortex areas Brodmann area 11,12 and 13;in humans it consists of Brodmann area 10,11 and 47.
Peter Dayan is a British neuroscientist and computer scientist who is director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen,Germany,along with Ivan De Araujo. He is co-author of Theoretical Neuroscience,an influential textbook on computational neuroscience. He is known for applying Bayesian methods from machine learning and artificial intelligence to understand neural function and is particularly recognized for relating neurotransmitter levels to prediction errors and Bayesian uncertainties. He has pioneered the field of reinforcement learning (RL) where he helped develop the Q-learning algorithm,and made contributions to unsupervised learning,including the wake-sleep algorithm for neural networks and the Helmholtz machine.
Frontostriatal circuits are neural pathways that connect frontal lobe regions with the striatum and mediate motor,cognitive,and behavioural functions within the brain. They receive inputs from dopaminergic,serotonergic,noradrenergic,and cholinergic cell groups that modulate information processing. Frontostriatal circuits are part of the executive functions. Executive functions include the following:selection and perception of important information,manipulation of information in working memory,planning and organization,behavioral control,adaptation to changes,and decision making. These circuits are involved in neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease as well as neuropsychiatric disorders including schizophrenia,depression,obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD),and in neurodevelopmental disorder such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
The reward system is a group of neural structures responsible for incentive salience,associative learning,and positively-valenced emotions,particularly ones involving pleasure as a core component. Reward is the attractive and motivational property of a stimulus that induces appetitive behavior,also known as approach behavior,and consummatory behavior. A rewarding stimulus has been described as "any stimulus,object,event,activity,or situation that has the potential to make us approach and consume it is by definition a reward". In operant conditioning,rewarding stimuli function as positive reinforcers;however,the converse statement also holds true:positive reinforcers are rewarding.
Pendleton Read Montague,Jr. is an American neuroscientist and popular science author. He is the director of the Human Neuroimaging Lab and Computational Psychiatry Unit at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC in Roanoke,Virginia,where he also holds the title of the inaugural Virginia Tech Carilion Vernon Mountcastle Research Professor. Montague is also a professor in the department of physics at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg,Virginia and professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine at Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine.
Earl Keith Miller is a cognitive neuroscientist whose research focuses on neural mechanisms of cognitive,or executive,control. Earl K. Miller is the Picower Professor of Neuroscience with the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the Chief Scientist and co-founder of SplitSage. He is a co-founder of Neuroblox.
Bayesian approaches to brain function investigate the capacity of the nervous system to operate in situations of uncertainty in a fashion that is close to the optimal prescribed by Bayesian statistics. This term is used in behavioural sciences and neuroscience and studies associated with this term often strive to explain the brain's cognitive abilities based on statistical principles. It is frequently assumed that the nervous system maintains internal probabilistic models that are updated by neural processing of sensory information using methods approximating those of Bayesian probability.
Consumer neuroscience is the combination of consumer research with modern neuroscience. The goal of the field is to find neural explanations for consumer behaviors in individuals both with or without disease.
The Troland Research Awards are an annual prize given by the United States National Academy of Sciences to two researchers in recognition of psychological research on the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. The areas where these award funds are to be spent include but are not limited to areas of experimental psychology,the topics of sensation,perception,motivation,emotion,learning,memory,cognition,language,and action. The award preference is given to experimental work with a quantitative approach or experimental research seeking physiological explanations.
Daniela Schiller is a neuroscientist who leads the Affective Neuroscience Lab at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She is best known for her work on memory reconsolidation,and on modification of emotional learning and memory.
Ilana B. Witten is an American neuroscientist and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University. Witten studies the mesolimbic pathway,with a focus on the striatal neural circuit mechanisms driving reward learning and decision making.
Kanaka Rajan is a computational neuroscientist in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and founding faculty in the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University. Rajan trained in engineering,biophysics,and neuroscience,and has pioneered novel methods and models to understand how the brain processes sensory information. Her research seeks to understand how important cognitive functions —such as learning,remembering,and deciding —emerge from the cooperative activity of multi-scale neural processes,and how those processes are affected by various neuropsychiatric disease states. The resulting integrative theories about the brain bridge neurobiology and artificial intelligence.
In the context of artificial neural network,pruning is the practice of removing parameters from an existing network. The goal of this process is to maintain accuracy of the network while increasing its efficiency. This can be done to reduce the computational resources required to run the neural network. A biological process of synaptic pruning takes place in the brain of mammals during development.
Catherine Hartley is an American psychologist and an Associate Professor of Psychology within the Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science at New York University in New York City. Hartley's research explores how brain development impacts the evaluation of negative experiences,decision-making,and motivated behavior. Her work has helped to elucidate how uncontrollable aversive events affect fear learning and how learning to control aversive stimuli can improve emotional resilience.