I am a Psychology PhD candidate at the University of California at Berkeley. I primarily work with Dr. Celeste Kidd in the Kidd Lab and Dr. Bill Thompson in the Computational Cognitive Science Lab. I also work with Dr. Steve Piantadosi and Dr. Mark Ho. I graduated from UC Berkeley in 2021 with a BA in Computer Science, Physics, and Psychology.

Research focus: I study how human children, adults, and artificial agents develop and use strategies in solving complex problems.

Publications

Selected

Yang, H.A., Thompson, B., Kidd, C. (2025). Children spontaneously discover efficient solutions to a difficult sorting task. In Nature Human Behaviour. Selected Press: The Conversation | New Scientist | San Francisco Chronicle | Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Other

Yang, H. A., Ho, M.K., & Thompson, B.D. (2026). Hypothesis-guided discovery of cognitive algorithms via program refinement. arXiv preprint.

Yang, H. A., Kidd, C. (2026). What certainty and other metacognitive representations in cognitive development reveal about the future of AI models. DevAI Workshop at NeurIPS 2026.

Yang, H. A., Skwersky, R., Thompson, B.D., Kidd, C. (2026). AYO: A Safe and Privacy-Preserving Platform for Studying Children’s Interactions with LLMs. Child Safety in AI Workshop at NeurIPS 2026.

Yang, H.A., Ho, M., Thompson, B.D. (2026). Spontaneous meta‑learning of efficient problem‑solving algorithms. In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Fang, Y., Yang, H.A., Christie, S. (2025). Early experiences in shaping children’s explore‑exploit decisions: evidence from the rural‑urban gap. In Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Yang, H.A., Martí, L., Baer, C., Granera, A., Palmeri, H., Kidd, C. (2024). Emergence of certainty representations for guiding concept learning. In Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Yang, H.A., Thompson, B.D., Kidd, C. (2024). Children Spontaneously Discover Efficient Sorting Algorithms in a Seriation Task. In Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Yang, H.A., Piantadosi, S.T., Kidd, C. (2023). Children’s Estimation of Peripheral Information Drives Improvements in Approximate Number Sense. In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.