Jonathan D. Cohen

Timeline

1. 1983–1990

   An MD and a PhD

   He earns an MD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 and completes an internship and residency in psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine. His 1990 PhD in cognitive psychology at Carnegie Mellon, advised by James L. McClelland, has the thesis "Attention and the processing of context: A parallel distributed processing approach to normal and disordered cognition".

2. 1993–2000

   PsyScope and a move to Princeton

   He is a lead or co-lead developer of PsyScope, the first graphically oriented tool for designing and implementing computer-based cognitive experiments, which he and colleagues report in 1993. He joins Princeton in 1998 after working at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. In 2000, he becomes founding director of Princeton's Center for the Study of Brain, Mind, and Behavior and is responsible for acquiring its fMRI scanner.

3. 1994–2018

   Psychology awards and fellowships

   He receives the Joseph Zubin Award in 1994 and the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology in 2010. He is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science from 2007 and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science from 2012. In 2018, he receives the APS William James Fellow Award.

4. 2004–2023

   Co-founding Princeton Neuroscience Institute

   The Princeton Neuroscience Institute is created in 2004 under the leadership of Cohen and molecular biology professor David Tank, who serve as its co-directors until 2023. He is also scientific director of the Scully Center for the Neuroscience of Mind and Behavior within the institute.

5. 2005

   A locus coeruleus theory

   In 2005, he and Gary Aston-Jones publish "An integrative theory of locus coeruleus-norepinephrine function: Adaptive gain and optimal performance" in Annual Review of Neuroscience. His lab's theoretical work also covers dopamine's role in gating and updating information in prefrontal cortex, noradrenergic regulation of the explore/exploit tradeoff, and the regulation of exploration in reinforcement learning.

6. 2020–2021

   A model description format

   As principal investigator of an NSF Convergence Accelerator project from 2020 to 2021, he works on a standardized Model Description Format (MDF) for neuroscience, cognitive science, machine learning and beyond. MDF expresses models of brain and cognitive function as computational graphs in machine-readable form for exchange across modeling environments. His software projects include BrainIAK, an open-source toolbox for applying machine-learning methods to brain imaging data that he co-leads with Ted Willke of Intel, as well as PsyNeuLink and SweetPea.

7. 2022

   A NeurIPS Outstanding Paper

   In 2022, he co-authors "Using natural language and program abstractions to instill human inductive biases in machines" with nine co-authors, including Sreejan Kumar and Thomas Griffiths, and the paper wins an Outstanding Paper Award at NeurIPS 2022. It co-trains meta-reinforcement-learning agents on predicting representations from natural language task descriptions and from programs induced to generate the tasks, which guides the agents toward more human-like inductive biases.

8. As of October 2026

   Professor at Princeton

   He is the Robert Bendheim and Lynn Bendheim Thoman Professor in Neuroscience and a professor of psychology at Princeton, listed with the Center for Statistics & Machine Learning, Princeton Language and Intelligence and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. In 2026, he is last author of "A Computational Basis of Natural Intelligence" in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research. He is principal investigator of an Office of Naval Research project, funded from 2021 to 2026, titled "Toward a Brain-Inspired Model of the Flexibility and Autonomy of Human Behavior".