Hello!

I am a Ph.D. student at Princeton University, advised by Drs. Natalia Vélez and Tom Griffiths. I am interested in the computational cognitive science of human aggregate minds (HAM). How do the cognitive properties of each individual human mind and brain create emergent properties of human interactions and group behaviors and how does information from group and interactive settings shape individual cognitive mechanisms. How does working together as a group make some computational problems easier and what new computational problems it uniquely imposes? I intend to draw insights from diverse academic domains to study these questions, especially psychology, computer science, economics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and philosophy.

Interests

The cognitive neural mechanisms of working memory collaboration.
Teaching and transmission of abstraction among minds.
Collaboration of joint motor action.

Education

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

University of California, Berkeley

Recent & Upcoming Talks

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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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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Ham, H, Jenkins, A. C (2022). Effects of social context on reward-based learning. In Neuroecon 2022.

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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.