Nori Jacoby

Overview

Nori Jacoby is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. His research focuses on the internal representations that support and shape our sensory and cognitive abilities, and on how those representations are themselves determined by both nature and nurture. He addresses these classic issues with new tools, both by applying machine learning techniques to behavioral experiments, and by expanding the scale and scope of experimental research via massive online experiments and fieldwork in locations around the globe. Nori completed his Ph.D. at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (ELSC) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Naftali Tishby and Merav Ahissar, followed by postdoctoral positions at Josh McDermott's Computational Audition Lab at MIT, at Tom Griffiths's Computational Cognitive Science Lab at UC Berkeley, and as a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University. Before coming to Cornell Nori was a Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt.

Publications

Selected Publications

1. Jacoby, N., R. Polak, J. Grahn, D. Cameron, K. M. Lee, R. Godoy, E. A. Undurraga, T. Huanca, T. Thalwitzer, N. Doumbia, D. Goldberg, E. Margulis, P. C. M. Wong, L. Jure, M. Rocamora, S. Fujii, P. E. Savage, J. Ajimi, R. Konno, S. Oishi, K. Jakubowski, A. Holzapfel, E. Mungan, E. Kaya, P. Rao, R. M. Ananthanarayana, S. Alladi, B. Tarr, M. Anglada-Tort, P. Harrison, M. J. McPherson, S. Dolan, A. Durango & J. H. McDermott. (2024). Cross-cultural commonalities and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a large-scale comparison of rhythm priors from around the world. Nature Human Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01800-9.
2. Tchernichovski, O., S. Frey, N. Jacoby†, D. Conley†. (2023). Incentivizing free riders improves collective intelligence in social dilemmas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 120.46, p. e2311497120. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2311497120.
3. Marjieh, R.*, P. M. C. Harrison*, H. Lee, F. Deligiannaki & N. Jacoby. (2023). Timbral effects on consonance disentangle psychoacoustic mechanisms and suggest perceptual origins for musical scales. Nature Communications vol. 15: 1482. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-45812-z.
4. Anglada-Tort, M., P. M. C. Harrison, H. Lee, & N. Jacoby. (2023). Large-scale iterated singing experiments reveal oral transmission mechanisms underlying music evolution. Current Biology 33.8, 1472-1486.e12. 
5. Langlois, T. A., H. C. Zhao, E. Grant, I. Dasgupta, T. L. Griffiths & N. Jacoby. (2021). Passive attention in artificial neural networks predicts human visual selectivity. Oral presentation, Proceedings of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 34, 27094–27106.
6. Langlois, T. A.,* N. Jacoby,* J. Suchow & T. L. Griffiths (2021). Serial reproduction reveals the geometry of visuospatial representations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 118(13), e2012938118. 
7. Roeske,* T. C., O. Tchernichovski,* D. Poeppel & N. Jacoby (2020). Categorical rhythms shared between songbirds and humans. Current Biology 30.18 3544–3555.e6.
8. Harrison, P. M. C., R. Marjieh, F. Adolfi, P. van Rijn, M. Anglada-Tort, O. Tchernichovski, P. Larrouy-Maestri & N. Jacoby(2020). Gibbs sampling with people. Oral presentation. Proceedings of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 33, 10659–10671.
9. Jacoby, N., E. A. Undurraga, M. J. McPherson, J. Valdes, T. Ossandon & J. H. McDermott (2019). Universal and non-universal features of musical pitch perception revealed by sung reproduction. Current Biology 29, 1–15.
10. Jacoby, N. & J. H. McDermott (2017). Integer ratio priors on musical rhythm revealed cross-culturally by iterated reproduction. Current Biology 27.3, 359–370.

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