Itamar Jalon

Itamar Jalon is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI) at Princeton University for the 2024-25 academic year, affiliated with both the Hasson Lab and Music Cognition Lab. His research leverages deep learning models to study social and higher-order cognitive processes—including meaning-making in naturalistic interactions, emotion, self- and other-perception, and creativity—in ecologically valid settings.

Dr. Jalon earned his PhD (pending approval) in psychology from Tel Aviv University, where his doctoral work focused on computational representations of autobiographical emotions. Prior research spans the neuroscience of pain, creativity, neuromodulation, and psychiatric interventions, reflecting an interdisciplinary approach bridging psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence.

His current work applies large language models to decode naturalistic human speech and ECoG neural recordings, targeting real-world cognitive phenomena. This positions him at the intersection of machine learning and cognitive neuroscience, with emphasis on affective and social processes in uncontrolled environments.

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Dr. Jalon actively contributes to two specialized research units at PNI: the Hasson Lab (investigating neural mechanisms of communication) and the Music Cognition Lab (exploring cognitive foundations of musical experience), utilizing these platforms for naturalistic neuroscience methodologies.