Hello!

I am a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, advised by Drs. Natalia Vélez (from year 1-3) and Tom Griffiths (from year 1-5) and Diana Tamir (from year 4-5). I am interested in the computational cognitive science of human aggregated mind (HAM): How can information representations at the level of a collective of human minds emerge from cognitive properties of individual mind? My current projects study this phenomenon from two extremities of group size: dyadic interaction of two people and cultural evolution of human society. I intend to draw insights from diverse academic domains to study these questions, especially psychology, computer science, economics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, philosophy, and anthropology.

Interests

How cognitive and neural representation change or emerge as part of a collective mind.
How cognitive limitations drive the behavior of an agentic collective.
AI and human collaboration.

Education

MA in psychology, 2023-2025

Princeton University
BA in psychology, applied mathematics, and philosophy, 2016-2020

University of California, Berkeley

Recent & Upcoming Talks

Poster at CCN 2026

Automated Discovery of Cognitive Collaboration Dynamics

Aug 6, 2026 1:45 PM — 3:30 PM Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms, New York University

Talk at Metacognitive science meeting 2026

Adaptivity of Collaborative Visual Working Memory

Aug 2, 2026 12:30 PM — 1:30 PM 501 Schermerhorn, Columbia University Campus

Talk at Metacognitive science meeting 2026

Poster at CogSci 2026

Modeling Context-Sensitive Effects of Inequity on Reinforcement Learning

Jul 24, 2026 9:30 AM — 11:00 AM Sheraton Grand Rio Hotel & Resort, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Talk at CogSci 2026

Rational Teachers Should ‘Lie’ to Bounded Students

Jul 23, 2026 1:15 PM — 2:45 PM Sheraton Grand Rio Hotel & Resort, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Poster at SPP 2026

Toward a Computational Cognitive Science of Collectives

Jun 19, 2026 6:15 PM — 7:45 PM Johns Hopkins University Scott-Bates Commons Banquet Room

See all events

Publications & Presentations

Quickly discover relevant content by filtering publications.

Ham, H, Wang, M, Kable, J. W, Jenkins, A. C (2026). Modeling Context-Sensitive Effects of Inequity on Reinforcement Learning. In Cog Sci 2026.

PDF Cite

Ham, H, Arumugam, D, Correa, C. G, Zhao, B, Griffiths, T. L, Velez, N (2026). Rational Teachers Should ‘Lie’ to Bounded Students. In Cog Sci 2026.

PDF Cite

Defendini, A, Ham, H, Berkay, D, Jenkins, A. C (2026). Contributions of the Brain's Mentalizing Network to Inferences about Others' Stable and Transient Beliefs and Preferences. In Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

PDF Cite

Ham, H, McDougle, S. D, Collins, A. GE (2025). Dual Effects of Dual-Tasking on Instrumental Learning. In Cognition.

PDF Cite Poster

Ham, H, Jenkins, A. C (2025). Social inequity disrupts reward-based learning. In Communications Psychology.

PDF Cite Poster

See all publications

Biography

My legal name in the US is Honghao Huang (黄泓皓). However, I always go by the name Ham and I publish as Ham H. Ham has been my nickname since childhood (火腿) and it is a name from the old testament. Any name from the Bible is a fair English name lol. I was born and raised in Shenzhen (深圳), China. My parents had immigrated from the Hunan (湖南) province. For the first 1.5 years of my high school, I attended Shenzhen middle school (深圳中学) and for the rest of my 2.5 years of high school, I attended Notre Dame high school located at Easton, Pennsylvania. I did my undergraduate at UC Berkeley from 2016-2020, where I was a undergraduate research assistant at Dr. Anne Collins’s lab from 2018-2020. Afterwards, I worked as a full-time lab manager at Dr. Adrianna Jenkins’s lab at University of Pennsylvania from 2020-2023. Now I am a Ph.D. student at Princeton University.