About NAIADEL
A confluence for the science of adaptive intelligence and agency.
We bring together neuroscience, cognitive psychology, economics, computational modeling, and artificial intelligence to understand how minds and systems learn, adapt, exercise control, and maintain agency under changing conditions.
Where streams of knowledge meet.
Central to our research are the mechanisms of meta-learning and meta-control: the higher-order processes through which systems regulate how they learn and dynamically select, switch, allocate, and restructure control strategies. We view adaptive intelligence as an emergent property of these hierarchical mechanisms. Together, they enable systems to revise how they learn, infer where control resides, and acquire, share, relinquish, or reorganize control as environments change.
Agency therefore involves more than representing or inferring control. It emerges when systems use these inferences to organize behavior around purposes and, through action, reshape the environments that in turn shape them.
The name NAIADEL draws inspiration from the Naiads of Greek mythology: spirits and stewards of freshwater rivers, streams, and springs. Their domains were dynamic systems shaped by continual interaction between landscape, environment, and flow.
For us, the name also reflects a different kind of confluence: the coming together of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, economics, and artificial intelligence into a living scientific ecosystem dedicated to understanding adaptive intelligence and agency.
This symbolism extends beyond disciplines. Just as rivers connect local processes to larger systems, our research seeks to understand how adaptive intelligence emerges across analytical scales: from neural circuits and computational mechanisms, to behavior and cognition, to mental health and artificial intelligence. We are particularly interested in the mechanisms that allow systems to regulate learning, acquire and relinquish control, and continually reorganize themselves in response to changing environments.
In this sense, NAIADEL carries both a literal and symbolic meaning: a place where different streams of knowledge converge to study how adaptive systems persist, adapt, and reshape the worlds that shape them.
Neurocomputation
The neural and computational mechanisms through which biological and artificial systems learn, decide, and adapt. From the micro-scale of synaptic updates to the macro-scale of population dynamics and emergent cognition.
Adaptive Intelligence
The capacity to adjust learning, beliefs, strategies, and behavior as uncertainty, goals, and environmental demands change.
Embodied Learning
How intelligence develops through action and interaction with the world, as systems learn to acquire, relinquish, and reorganize control.
Mechanism-based
We seek explicit accounts of the processes that generate adaptive and maladaptive behavior.
Multi-scale
We connect computational mechanisms with behavior, brain, lived experience, and changing environments.
Translational
We use foundational mechanisms to inform mental health, adaptive environments, and agency-supportive artificial systems.
NAIADEL is the academic research lab and scientific home for foundational work on adaptive intelligence and agency. Gearshift Fellowship is a broader collaborative research environment through which shared experimental platforms, models, community activities, and cross-institutional projects can develop.
Through this relationship, the lab can pursue focused scientific questions while contributing to an ecosystem larger than any single laboratory.
Follow the lab's work and get in touch through these channels.