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)

• Zhang, P. & Ma, W. J. (2024). Temporal discounting predicts procrastination in the real world. Scientific Report. [pdf]
• Zhang, P. & Ma, W. J. (2025). A normative account of procrastination and its correlates, consequences, and interventions. PsyArXiv. [pdf]
• Invited talk in Society for NeuroEconomics 2023, Vancouver [pdf]
• Poster presentation in Cognitive Computational Neuroscience 2023, Oxford University [pdf]
• Poster presentation in Cognitive Computational Neuroscience 2019, Berlin [pdf]

• Research CV

• PhD Dissertation

Science Communication

I am passionate about playful approaches to science communication. I experimented with a video to share my own research findings in a playful way.

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 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.