Hongbin Wang, PhD

Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs

Contact

Hongbin.Wang@uth.tmc.edu
7000 Fannin, Suite 600
Houston, TX 77030

Phone: 713-500-3911
Fax: 713-500-3929

Education

  • Ph.D., 1998, The Ohio State University (Psychology. Major in Cognitive/Experimental Psychology, Minor in Quantitative Psychology)
  • M.S., 1998, The Ohio State University (Computer and Information Science, Specialty in Artificial Intelligence)
  • M.A., 1995, The Ohio State University (Psychology)
  • B.S., 1991, Peking University (Psychology)

Research Interests

In the most general terms, Dr. Wang is interested in understanding how the human brain works to support the human mind. In recent years he has been focusing on studying the issue from a multilevel analysis perspective. By combining empirical, neuroimaging, and computational modeling techniques, he attempts to systematically discover and link the neuronal, behavioral, and symbolic correlates of human cognition. He believes that an understanding of the meta nature of the system might hold a key for understanding the brain and the mind, and he coins his approach "metamodeling." His recent research includes human reasoning and decision making, human attention and spatial cognition, and computational cognitive architectures.

Research Projects

  • Computational Modeling of Human Attention
  • Cognitive-Affective Interactions in Human Decision Making
  • Modeling Human Spatial Cognition
  • Brain and Cognitive Mechanisms of Skill Acquisition
  • Number Sense, Mathematical Cognition

Publications

1. Sun, Y., Wang, H., Zhang, J., & Smith, J. W. (in press). Probabilistic judgment on a coarser scale. Cognitive Systems Research.

2. Wang, H., & Fan, J. (2007). Human attentional networks: A connectionist model. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16, 1678-1689.

3. Liu, X., Powell, D. K., Wang, H., Gold, B. T., Corbly, C. R., & Joseph, J. E. (2007). Functional dissociation in frontal and striatal areas for processing of positive and negative reward information. Journal of Neuroscience, 27, 4587-4597.

4. Wang, H., & Sun, Y. (2007). Salience Based Hierarchical Spatial Representations. In Proceedings of the Twenty-ninth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

5. Liu, X., Wang, H., Corbly, C. R., Zhang, J., & Joseph, J. E. (2006). The involvement of the inferior parietal cortex in the numerical stroop effect and the distance effect in a two-digit number comparison task. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 1518-1530.

6. Wang, H., Johnson, T. R., & Zhang, J. (2006). The order effect in human abductive reasoning: An empirical and computational study. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 18(2), 215-247.

7. Wang, H., Johnson, T. R., & Zhang, J. (2006). A hybrid system of abductive tactical decision making. International Journal of Hybrid Intelligent Systems, 3, 23-33.

8. Wang, H., Coble, C., & Bello, P. (2006). Cognitive-affective interactions in human decision-making: A neurocomputational approach. In Proceedings of the Twenty-eighth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

9. Wang, H., Johnson, T. R., Sun, Y., & Zhang, J. (2005). Object-location memory: The interplay of multiple representations. Memory & Cognition, 33(7), 1147-1159.

10. Wang, H., Sun, Y., Johnson, T. R., & Yuan, Y. (2005). Prioritized spatial updating in intrinsic frame of reference. Spatial Cognition and Computation, 5(1), 89-112.

11. Zhang, J., & Wang, H. (2005). The effect of external representations on numeric tasks. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58A(5), 817-838.

12. Wang, H., Johnson, T. R., Bao, R. (2005). What vs Where: Which direction is faster? In Proceedings of the Twenty-seventh Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

13. Wang, H., Fan, J., & Johnson, T. R. (2004). A symbolic model of human attentional networks. Cognitive Systems Research, 5, 119-134.

14. Wang, H., & Yang, Y. (2004). [Commentary] Representing is more than emulating. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27(3), 420-421.

    PubMed search for Dr. Wang

    Research Support

    Dr. Wang's research has been supported by a number of funding agencies, including NASA, Office of Naval Research (ONR), Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), and Vivian L. Smith Foundation.