iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ham @hamhuang.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Ellie is fun, friendly, and extremely smart and astute. I have been getting tones of scientific insights and emotional support from her just as her colleague in the department. Can’t imagine how much the positivity would scale up if you were her mentee. Highly recommend applying to work with her!!

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Ham @hamhuang.bsky.social · 02/08/2026

Interested in Automated model discovery and two people collaborating on visual memory? Please find my poster at session F 08/06 1:45-3:30 pm. Poster number F58 #CCN26

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Ham @hamhuang.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

I will be presenting a poster at society for philosophy and psychology meeting 2026 at 06/19 6pm. The title is: toward a computational cognitive science of collectives. Looking forward to seeing you there! For details please check out my personal website: huangham.github.io

huangham.github.io

Ham Huang

A highly-customizable Hugo academic resume theme powered by Wowchemy website builder.

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ellaqiawenliu.bsky.social @ellaqiawenliu.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

New paper out in Psych bull & review! With @glupyan.bsky.social It’s a big-picture review on cross-domain mapping: how people connect things across senses and concepts, and why (weak) synesthesia and metaphor might all be part of the same story. link.springer.com/article/10.3...

link.springer.com

The unity of sense and mind: A review of cross-domain mapping - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

If the sound of a trombone had a taste, would it be bitter? In what way is solving a puzzle like navigating a relationship? People consistently map information across sensory modalities and conceptual...

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Adele Goldberg @adelegoldberg.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

Very cool work by Qiawen (Ella) Liu, Paridon, @glupyan.bsky.social: e.g., Is white hot or cold? LMs consider 'white' cold because it's mediated by 'snow' Ablate the mediators, and you eliminate the associations. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

nature.com

Learning about color from language - Communications Psychology

Blind people show similar associations between adjectives (e.g. cold) and colours (e.g. blue) as sighted people; word embedding models trained on corpora of written and spoken language learn these ass...

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Liu, Shuze @liushuze.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

@gershbrain.bsky.social and I have a new paper in PLOS Comp Bio! We study how two cognitive constraints—action consideration set size & policy complexity—interact in context-dependent decision making, and how humans exploit their synergy to reduce behavioral suboptimality. osf.io/preprints/ps...

osf.io

OSF

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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

If you work on artificial or natural intelligence and are finishing your PhD, consider applying for a Kempner research fellowship at Harvard: kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu/kempner-inst...

kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu

Kempner Research Fellowship - Kempner Institute

The Kempner brings leading, early-stage postdoctoral scientists to Harvard to work on projects that advance the fundamental understanding of intelligence.

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Communications Psychology @commspsychol.nature.com · 18/08/2025

People learn from rewards differently when outcomes are shared with others. Learning slows when receiving smaller reward shares, and social stereotypes about partners further impair learning with cognitive demands. @hamhuang.bsky.social @annajenkins.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44...

nature.com

Social inequity disrupts reward-based learning - Communications Psychology

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Ham @hamhuang.bsky.social · 17/08/2025

Great mentor! Can’t go wrong!

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Ham @hamhuang.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

Imagine this scenario: would you rather me giving $2 to you and $1000 to a politician or not giving you or the politician any money at all? Many people would choose the latter option, even though the first option gives them more monetary benefits.

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Ham @hamhuang.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

People don’t always choose the option with more money because what people find rewarding is not simply the amount of money, but also social equity. When deciding which option is more rewarding, people consider both the amount of money and the inequity.

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Ham @hamhuang.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

However, making decisions is different from learning from rewards. People always know which option feels more rewarding to them when making decisions, but learning from reward can happen very implicitly. People learn to choose the rewarding options without knowing it.

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Ham @hamhuang.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

How can social inequity matter if people may not even realize that they learned from reward? We found that surprisingly, it matters! A lot! This suggests that social inequity profoundly impacts reward representation at all levels.

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Ham @hamhuang.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

In 3 experiments (N=280), subjects tried to learn which of 3 keys gave more reward ($0, $1, or $2) in different contexts. The reward was split with another person. We manipulated the inequity level from 0% to 100%. The keypress only determined the total reward.

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Ham @hamhuang.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

We found a huge inequity effect. When subjects received less than 50% of the reward, they learned more slowly and less effectively. Moreover, they were more sensitive to inequity levels under 50%. For example, 80% vs 90% made less difference to learning quality than 10% vs 20%.

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Ham @hamhuang.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

We discovered that reinforcement learning is also socially contextual! We are currently working on an fMRI study to tackle follow-up questions about how the social brain ties to the learning brain, led by Mu-chen and in collaboration with Joe Kable. Stay tuned!

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Ham @hamhuang.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

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Ham @hamhuang.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

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Ham @hamhuang.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

Here is the full poster ;)

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Vélez Lab at UCSD @velezcolab.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

The CoLab is headed to #CogSci2025!! 🥳 Here's where to find us!

A lineup showing upcoming talks and posters for the CoLab at CogSci 2025.

Wednesday
Natalia Vélez: Understanding structural diversity in human collaboration
Metareasoning Workshop, Pacific H, 10:30-11:10am

Thursday
Huang Ham: Collaborative encoding of visual working memory
P1-H-244

Friday
Bonan Zhao (new PI!): Discovering hidden laws in innovation by recombination
P2-Z-231

Elizabeth Mieczkowski: A normative account of specialization: How task and environment shape role differentiation in collaboration
P2-M-133

Bella Fascendini: Are two-year-olds intrinsically motivated to explore their own competence?
Learning & Development 2, Salon 6, 1-2:30pm

Saturday
Renée Creppy (first-timer!): Children’s expectations of dominant and prestigious leaders
P3-C-40

Natalia Vélez: Thinking in teams
Invited Symposium: New Theoretical Directions in Cognitive Science
Salon 7, 2:15-3:45pm

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Robert Hawkins @rdhawkins.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

"We introduce Collaborative Rational Speech Act (CRSA), an information-theoretic (IT) extension of RSA that models multi-turn dialog by optimizing a gain function adapted from rate-distortion theory." arxiv.org/abs/2507.14063

arxiv.org

Collaborative Rational Speech Act: Pragmatic Reasoning for Multi-Turn Dialog

As AI systems take on collaborative roles, they must reason about shared goals and beliefs-not just generate fluent language. The Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework offers a principled approach to pr...

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Ham @hamhuang.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

Excited to see the work during my undergrad times finally come out! Learned so much from working with Sam and Anne on this project.

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Vélez Lab at UCSD @velezcolab.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

We are so excited to welcome our summer RA's to the lab! Looking forward to a productive summer💫 @bellafascendini.bsky.social @hamhuang.bsky.social @creppy-r.bsky.social

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