Research
I study decision-making, goal pursuit, motivation, and affect.
My current work focuses on understanding what gets in the way of people's long-term goal pursuit, with an emphasis on procrastination, within Wei Ji Ma's 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 MORT that mimics real-world scenarios while still allowing for manipulations. We also built computational cognitive models to uncover the cognitive processes underlying procrastination.
Below are some readings for further exploration: (You can find more resources in Google Scholar)
- Zhang, P. Y. & Ma, W. J. (2024). Temporal discounting predicts procrastination in the real world. Scientific Reports. [pdf]
- Zhang, P. Y. & Ma, W. J. (2025). A normative account of procrastination and its correlates, consequences, and interventions. In press at Psychological Review. [pdf]
- Zhang, P. Y. , Lin, Y., Lieder, F., & Ma, W. J. (2026). Immediate reward reduces procrastination in a naturalistic multi-day task. Under review at Nature Communications. [pdf]
- Chebolu, S., Zhang, P. Y., Ma, W., & Dayan, P. (2026). Now or later: A reinforcement learning model of behavioural delay. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 2026. [pdf]
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 have written a popular science blog in Chinese since 2017 on psychology and neuroscience research, focusing on findings people can use in everyday life. It reaches a wide general audience; one article on neuroimaging studies of women's pregnancy reached 20,000 readers and drew extensive comments and discussion.