Principal Investigator

Hang Zhang
perception and action, decision-making, computational modeling

phone:
address:
email: hang.zhang@pku.edu.cn

 

Research Interests:

In Hang Zhang’s Computation and Decision Lab, we combine behavioral experiment, computational modeling and neuroimaging techniques to study a variety of decision problems in human perception and cognition, bridging psychology, cognitive neuroscience, statistical decision theory and economic decision-making. What concern us are the general computational principles behind human judgment and decision-making in different areas.

 

Many of our studies have one common keyword: uncertainty. In a world without uncertainty, most decision problems would have been trivial. In contrast, uncertainty is everywhere in the real world, which makes probabilistic computation an essential function of the brain. We ask: How does the brain, with its limited cognitive capacity, achieve efficient probabilistic computation? How does the brain model the uncertainty in its own perceptual and cognitive systems as well as the uncertainty in the environment? What are the prior beliefs or biases implicit in the brain’s probabilistic models? Any inspiration for artificial intelligence?

 

 

Selected Publications:

  1. Lu Y-L, Lu Y-F, Ren X, Zhang H* (2025). Exploring the bounded rationality in human decision anomalies through an assemblable computational framework. Cognitive Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2025.101713

  2. Lu Y-L#, Ge Y#, Li M, Liang S, Zhang X, Sui Y, Yang L, Li X, Zhang Y, Yue W, Zhang H*, Yan H* (2025) Cognitive Phenotype Shifts in Risk-Taking: Interplay of Non-Suicidal Self-Injury Behaviors and Intensified Depression. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 10(5), 504–512. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpsc.2024.05.011

  3. Wu X#, Ren X#, Liu C*, Zhang H* (2024). The motive cocktail in altruistic behaviors. Nature Computational Science. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-024-00685-6

  4. Zhang H*, Ren X, Maloney LT (2020) The bounded rationality of probability distortion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(36), 22024-22034. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1922401117

  5. Zhang H*, Daw ND, Maloney LT (2015) Human representation of visuo-motor uncertainty as mixtures of orthogonal basis distributions. Nature Neuroscience, 18, 1152-1158.https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4055

  6. Ren, X, Luo H*, Zhang H* (2021) Automatic and fast encoding of representational uncertainty underlies the distortion of relative frequency. Journal of Neuroscience.

  7. Zhang H*, Ren X, Maloney LT (2020) The bounded rationality of probability distortion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 117(36), 22024-22034. 

  8. Wang M, Huang Y, Luo H, Zhang H* (2020) Sustained visual priming effects can emerge from attentional oscillation and temporal expectation. Journal of Neuroscience. 40(18):3657–3674.

  9. Lu H, Yi L*, Zhang H* (2019) Autistic traits influence the strategic diversity of information sampling: insights from two-stage decision models. PLoS Computational Biology, 15(12): e1006964.

  10. Sun J, Li J*, Zhang H* (2019) Human representation of multimodal distributions as clusters of samples. PLoS Computational Biology, 15(5): e1007047.

  11. Zhang H*, Daw ND, Maloney LT (2015) Human representation of visuo-motor uncertainty as mixtures of orthogonal basis distributions. Nature Neuroscience, 18, 1152-1158.

  12. Zhang H*, Maloney LT. Ubiquitous log odds: a common representation of probability and frequency distortion in perception, action, and cognition. 2012, Frontiers in Neuroscience, 6(1). 

 

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