Yang Wu

Yang Wu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC). Her research focuses on developmental and computational affective cognition, examining how humans from infancy to adulthood use emotional cues to understand the physical and social world. She employs interdisciplinary methods such as behavioral experiments, exploratory play, eye tracking, and computational modeling.

• PhD in Cognitive Science from MIT (2018)
• Postdoctoral training at Stanford University (2018-2022)

Research areas include:

• Emotionese: Investigating infant-directed emotional expressions.
• Social Learning: How children use emotional cues for reasoning.
• Computational Models: Integrating speech, action, and emotion.
• Cultural Variability: Cross-cultural differences in emotion processing.

Her lab explores biases in educational contexts and trains graduate students in developmental psychology. Current students include Hanqi Chen, Grace Sun, and Marija Bolic.