Bio
I'm Pei Yuan (commonly known as Peipei). I’m a cognitive scientist and currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the Psychology Department at NYU (Ph.D. in neuroscience from NYU). I’m also a documentary director with a deep passion for telling the stories of people who live on the margins yet carry extraordinary strength.
Before joining NYU, I studied collective decision-making at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Prior to that, I earned my B.A. in Physics (with a minor in Psychology) in Nanjing and began a Ph.D. program in theoretical physics in Beijing, which I left to transition to neuroscience/psychology.
Research
I study procrastination in Wei Ji Ma lab. I aim to answer three main questions: 1) Why do people procrastinate? 2) Can we reduce procrastination? and 3) What is the cognitive process underlying procrastination? To address these questions, I analyzed real-world procrastination behavior and created a novel task called BORE that mimics real-world scenarios while still allowing for manipulations. Moreover, we built computational cognitive models to uncover the cognitive processes underlying procrastination.
Besides procrastination, I have broad interests in understanding people's affect, motivation, social interaction, and mental health. I love studying naturalistic behavior by creating novel experimental designs and using computational tools.
Below are some readings for further exploration: (You can find more resources in Google Scholar)
Documentary
The Opposite of Dying tells the story of my friend Tang, who has lived alone in a cave in the mountains for years with almost no money, and now dreams of becoming a successful entrepreneur. The documentary is an official selection at Sheffield DocFest 2025. You can read a short media piece about me in The Transmitter, which shares how I make my documentaries and what I’ve learned from filming people as a cognitive scientist who usually works with data and numbers. Here is a blog post about my experience presenting the documentary at Sheffield DocFest as an amateur.
Interactive Media Art/Science Communication/Writings
I attended the NYU ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program) Summer Camp in 2025, where I collaborated with artist Iris E. Fernández Valdés to use creative coding to transform my poem Life Is a Subway Tunnel into a digital video poem. The work was exhibited in After Hours, organized by Accent Sister Studio.
I am also passionate about playful approaches to science communication. Inspired by interactive media art, I designed a summer course—Playful Communication of Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Neuroscience—for Veritas China, a non-profit for Chinese high school and college students. In this interdisciplinary course, students learned tools such as digital game platforms and creative coding techniques to invent their own ways of communicating scientific stories. You can explore their work collection. I also experimented with a video to share my own research findings in a playful way. I also keep a writing collection on my WeChat public account, 佩佩的采思集. It began with popular science blogs, but over time, it has grown into a space for portraits, interviews, and reflections on life—capturing both the stories I encounter and the ways they shape me.