Developmental & Computational Affective Cognition Lab

Dr. Yang Wu

Lab Director

Yang is interested in how humans reason about emotion or affect, an emerging interdisciplinary domain called Affective Cognition. Yang studies affective cognition in humans from infancy to adulthood and uses a variety of approaches, including behavioral experiments, exploratory play, eye tracking, and computational modeling.

Yang is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She obtained her Ph.D. in Cognitive Science at MIT in 2018 and received her postdoctoral training at Stanford University from 2018 to 2022.

Dr. Tiffany Doan

Post Doc

Tiffany’s research focuses on cognitive development in early childhood, specifically social cognitive development. She is interested in how children and adults use probability to infer other people's emotions and the relationship between close counterfactual reasoning and emotion inferences. She’s also interested in children's desire-based reasoning, self-directed learning, and exploration.

Tiffany received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Waterloo.

Hanqi Chen

Lab Manager

Hanqi completed her BSc degree in Psychology at UTSC. She is interested in investigating how children perceive emotions, and how it would influence their behaviour. She is also interested in understanding interpersonal relationships, and hopes to pursue a career in these fields. Outside of the lab, Hanqi enjoys cooking and travelling.

Hanqi Zhang

Supervised Study Student

Hanqi Zhang is a senior applied Statistics student at the University of Toronto, with a cognitive psychology focus. She is interested in the designs and applications of statistical methods to other academic fields, and the psychological mechanisms of statistical reasoning and learning processes. Her favourite extracurricular activities are singing and solving logic puzzles.

Georgina Mariyadas

Work Study Student

Georgina is an undergraduate student pursuing a major in Psychology at UTSC. She is broadly interested in how our behavior is shaped by our perceptions of others throughout early childhood to late adulthood, as well as cultural differences in emotional expression. In her free time, she enjoys roller skating and finding new music to listen to.

Kelly Ma

Research Assistant

Kelly is interested in how the interaction between parents and infants, including motherese, contributes to the development of infants’ inferences of emotion and their recognition of the world.

Kelly is a 2nd-year student at UTSC and enrolled in both Specialist Psychology Program and Economics Major Program.

Nora Boghossian

Research Assistant

I’m an undergraduate student at UTSC doing a specialist in Psychology and major in Linguistics. I’m interested in the psychological mechanisms of language and how emotional expressions displayed in motherese influences language acquisition during childhood. On my free time I like to sing, play piano and cook!