Justin Yang

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Hi, I'm Justin! I'm a PhD student in Psychology at Stanford, advised by Tobi Gerstenberg. My research uses behavioral experiments and computational modeling to study how people interact with their environments to support learning and reasoning in everyday situations.

I am supported by a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship and an NDSEG Fellowship. Before graduate school, I was a data scientist at Signifyd, and before that I studied cognitive science and math at UCSD working with Judy Fan and Marcelo Mattar.

Otherwise I like to eat. Find me on beli @justintheyang!

Yang, J., Wong, L., Fan, J., & Gerstenberg, T. (2026). From chopped to cooked: Design and inference in physical environments. Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [pdf] [demos] [code]
Anderson, S. P., Yang, J., Bowers, M. L., Wong, L., & Fan, J. E. (2026). What reusable shortcuts do people propose when solving assembly problems? Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [pdf]
Yang, J., & Gerstenberg, T. (2025). Learning to plan from observed and counterfactual experiences. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [pdf] [demos] [code]
Yang, J.*, Brockbank, E.*, Govil, M., Fan, J., & Gerstenberg, T. (2024). Without his cookies, he's just a monster: A counterfactual simulation model of social explanation. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [pdf] [demos] [code]
Brockbank, E.*, Wang, H.*, Yang, J., Mirchandani, S., Bıyık, E., Sadigh, D., & Fan, J. (2022). How do people incorporate advice from artificial agents when making physical judgments? Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [pdf] [code]
Huey, H.*, Long, B.*, Yang, J., George, K., & Fan, J. (2022). Developmental changes in the semantic part structure of drawn objects. Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [pdf] [code]
Yang, J., & Fan, J. (2021). Visual communication of object concepts at different levels of abstraction. Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [pdf] [demos] [code]

* equal contribution

create-jspsych-experiment. Scaffolds a jsPsych experiment with consent, instructions, and exit-survey boilerplate. Run with npm create jspsych-experiment. npm →
create-jspsych-plugin. Scaffolds a jsPsych plugin package, with multi-plugin support. Run with npm create jspsych-plugin. npm →
Justin