Hello!

I am a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, advised by Drs. Natalia Vélez and Tom Griffiths. 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 representation changes during cognitive collaboration in dyads.
Resource-rational analysis of agentic collective of minds.
Compare collective cognition in human vs AI.

Education

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

University of California, Berkeley

Recent & Upcoming Talks

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

Talk at CCN 2025

Collaborative Encoding of Visual Working Memory

Aug 15, 2025 10:00 AM — 10:10 AM Amsterdam

Talk at Cog Sci 2023

A computational model of lexical false memory based on semantic distance from word embeddings

Jul 28, 2023 3:20 PM — 4:40 PM Sydney

Publications & Presentations

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

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

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Ham, H, Zhao, B, Griffiths, T. L, Velez, N (2025). Teaching Recombinable Motifs Through Simple Examples. In Cognitive Science.

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Plate, R. C, Ham, H, Jenkins, A. C (2023). When uncertainty in social contexts increases exploration and decreases obtained rewards. In JEP:G.

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Ham, H, Jenkins, A. C (2023). A computational model of lexical false memory based on semantic distance from word embeddings. In Cog Sci 2023.

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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.