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 infer the unknown 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...
AI Agents in Human Social Decision-Making: A Framework from Social Inference to Social Action.
Cortical knowledge structures guide word concept learning
AI Agents in Human Social Decision-Making: A Framework from Social Inference to Social Action.
Lab
News
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 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 reviewed the neurocognitive mechanisms of referential communication, highlighting 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.
