Nori Jacoby

Nori Jacoby is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University and a Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt. Her research bridges cognitive science, neuroscience, and machine learning to explore how internal representations shape sensory and cognitive abilities, with a focus on universality/diversity in perception and collective behavior.

• Education: PhD from Hebrew University of Jerusalem (ELSC), postdocs at MIT, UC Berkeley, and Columbia University
• Lab: Directs the CoCoCo Lab (Cornell Computational Cognition Lab)
• Funding: NSF-funded postdoctoral program collaborating with UC Davis, CUNY, and Princeton

Research interests include:

• High-dimensional perceptual spaces using adaptive sampling (e.g., Gibbs sampling with people)
• Cross-cultural studies of music and perception via global experiments
• Human-AI hybrid systems for collective creativity and decision-making

Recent work explores mechanisms of cultural diversity in urban populations, neural correlates of rhythm in stroke patients, and LLM alignment with human sensory judgments. Current projects include large-scale music evolution experiments and NSF-funded studies on collective intelligence.

Recruitment: Actively hiring postdocs and PhD students for interdisciplinary work.