Hi! I'm Zory Zhang,
You’re always welcome to reach out!
UIUC Japan House, 2025 Mar by Olivia
Here is my resumé:
I am interested in the mechanism of ontogenesis (cognitive development) and phylogenesis (comparative psychology). I am particularly interested in both the nature of the learning problem presented to children and children’s solution to it. On the problem side, what information (like over-hearing speech, social cues, abstract concepts in our compositional language) is available to children, and how hard the task is (like human simulation paradigms, Bayesian ideal observers). On the method side, I wonder whether children are resource-rational scientists generating and revising structured hypotheses, a concrete theory of bootstrapping, how language and cognitive development improve each other, and how we learn from errors we made in predictive processing and productions.
Computational modelling forces researchers to resolve ambiguities in their theories and avoid “not-even-wrong” errors. My computational modeling toolkit includes: basic Bayesian modeling, basic rational analysis, explanation-based learning (EBL), dynamic binding via neuron firing synchrony + Hebbian learning (LISA), deep learning, multi-dimensional scaling, and unsupervised incremental acquisition of probabilistic concept hierarchies (COBWEB).
Writing is the process through which ideas are produced and refined.
In this space, I will post blogs that contain mostly my original articulation, therefore prioritized over other pages on my website, which are mainly notes.