Lab
Overview
Making decisions is often challenging because we rarely have the full picture. When playing a new game, for example, we must figure out its hidden rules. Our lab studies how the human brain builds internal models of the world to fill in the missing pieces and guide complex decisions. These models help us understand how the world works, anticipate what might happen next, and apply our knowledge to novel situations. Studying these abilities is essential for understanding human intelligence and identifying limitations of current AI systems, with broader implications for clinical, business, educational, and legal applications. Read more...
Lab
News
Oct 12, 2026
Lusha was recently honored with the Mid-Career Award by the Society for Neuroeconomics at its annual meeting in Pasadena, California, USA. The award recognizes researchers who have demonstrated significant and lasting contributions to understanding the neural basis of decision making or the impact of this knowledge on formal understanding of decision behavior. Recipients are selected by a multidisciplinary committee based on the originality, rigor, and impact of their research.
Oct 8, 2026
Dr. Ka Kit Kong has been awarded postdoctoral fellowship from Beijing Human Resources and Social Security Bureau, which recognizes outstanding early-career researchers from overseas and Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan regions in the fields of science, engineering, agriculture, and medicine.
Oct 4, 2026
In a recent review, we discussed how AI agents challenge fundamental assumptions in human social cognition. We asked: How does human social cognition, evolved to interpret socially generated cues and predict the behavior of goal-directed agents, respond to AI-generated social signals that resemble human behavior but arise from fundamentally different generative processes? Big shout out to Guihua Yu at Peking University and Yunlu Yin at Fudan University for leading the work.
Also, Cognitive Science Research is a new journal dedicated to publishing fundamental and applied research on the nature and mechanisms of human cognition and intelligence. We warmly welcome submissions!
Apr 21, 2026
Check out our new paper with Yanchao Bi's lab at Peking University. We investigated how the human brain leverages prior knowledge to learn and generalize novel word concepts from limited examples, revealing distinct contributions of cortical Bayesian inference and hippocampal associative learning.
Feb 25, 2026
We recently reviewed how the brain understands referential signals, integrating ideas from research on perception, communication, and strategic decision-making. We highlighted how innate sensitivity to social cues, socially learned conventions, and deliberative reasoning about others’ mental states jointly support shared understanding and flexible social interaction. Kudos to Ningfeng for leading the work. Many thanks to our collaborators, Fang Yang and Yi Jiang at Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Interested in participating our experiments?
We regularly recruit healthy adults and/or adolescents to participate in various kinds of decision-making experiments. Please follow us on weChat for the latest information about our studies.
