Academic Team
Ori Amir
Faculty member in Psychology
Email: ori.amir@fulbright.edu.vn
Fields of Interest:
- Artificial Intelligence
- fMRI
- Creativity
- Humor
- Moral Perception
- Visual Object Recognition
Education:
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PhD: 2015, University of Southern California, USA
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PostDoc: 2017, University of California at Santa Barbara, USA
Bio:
Dr. Ori Amir is a cognitive neuroscientist with a focus on visual object recognition, moral cognition, humor, and creativity. His research employs advanced methods such as fMRI, eye-tracking, and computational modeling to explore the neural underpinnings of human behavior, with recent work examining the intersection of psychology and artificial intelligence. Dr. Amir’s publications are featured in journals like Nature Human Behavior and Cerebral Cortex. His work has been highlighted in Forbes, The Guardian, and Nature.
Dr. Amir earned his Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Southern California and completed a PostDoc at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has held academic positions at the University of Southern California and Pomona College.
Select Publications:
- Toplyn, Joe, and Ori Amir. “Can AI Make Us Laugh? Comparing Jokes Generated by Witscript and a Human Expert.” In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Computational Humor (CHum), pp. 71–78. (2025). Link
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Hopp, Frederic R., Ori Amir, Jacob T. Fisher, Scott Grafton, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and René Weber. “Moral foundations elicit shared and dissociable cortical activation modulated by political ideology.” Nature Human Behaviour 7, no. 12 (2023): 2182–2198. Link
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Amir, Ori, and Irving Biederman. “The neural correlates of humor creativity.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 10 (2016): 597. Link
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Amir, Ori, Irving Biederman, Zhuangjun Wang, and Xiaokun Xu. “Ha Ha! Versus Aha! A direct comparison of humor to nonhumorous insight for determining the neural correlates of mirth.” Cerebral Cortex 25, no. 5 (2015): 1405–1413. Link
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Amir, Ori, Konrad J. Utterback, Justin Lee, Kevin S. Lee, Suehyun Kwon, Dave M. Carroll, and Alexandra Papoutsaki. “The elephant in the room: attention to salient scene features increases with comedic expertise.” Cognitive Processing 23, no. 2 (2022): 203–215. Link
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Brawer, Jacob, and Ori Amir. “Mapping the ‘funny bone’: neuroanatomical correlates of humor creativity in professional comedians.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 16, no. 9 (2021): 915–925. Link
Courses:
- fMRI Explorations into Cognition
- Statistics for Social Sciences (with R)
- Data Mining for Psychologists
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Psychology of Humor
