Bio
I'm Pei Yuan (commonly known as Peipei), a postdoctoral researcher in the Psychology Department at NYU (Ph.D. in neuroscience from NYU). My research interests are motivation, decision-making, and affect. I work with Wei Ji Ma, studying the dynamic nature of procrastination. We 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, we analyzed real-world procrastination behavior. We designed 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 using novel experimental designs and computational tools.
Before joining NYU, I studied collective decision-making at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. I earned my B.A. in Physics and Psychology. In my free time, I like doing outreach: creating science videos and writing blogs to make science accessible to a broader audience. I also like documenting my life and other people's lives. Here’s a short media piece about me from The Transmitter, if you'd like to know more about my documentaries.
Research
My research interests are quite broad. I am excited about using novel experimental designs and computational tools to study naturalistic behavior, including decision-making, affect, motivation, social interaction, and mental health. My Ph.D. thesis focuses on the dynamic nature of procrastination, exploring it from a unique perspective: the cognitive mechanism. I’ve had the opportunity to present my findings to various communities, including the Cognitive Science Society, Cognitive Computational Neuroscience, NeuroEconomics, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, among others. Below are some readings for further exploration: