Professor
Pyungwon Kang
- social learning
- in-outgroup behavior
- empathy
- emotion regulation
- decision making
- fMRI
- brain stimulation
- computational modeling
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Education :
Ph.D. in Department of Brain & Cognitive Engineering Korea University (2015)
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Location :
W13, 402-11
- E-mail :
- Phone :
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Laboratory :
Social mind & Brain Lab
Biosketch
- Pyungwon Kang is an assistant professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at KAIST and she investigates the neural and cognitive mechanism of social behavior and social decision making.
- She studied Psychology at Seoul National University during her undergraduate studies and specialized in social psychology for her master’s degree at Seoul National University. She earned her PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Korea University in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Engineering. She continued her postdoctoral studies at the Zurich Center for Neuroeconomics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, using a neuroeconomics approach to investigate social behavior.
- Her work employs diverse methods to achieve a comprehensive understanding of human social behavior and neural mechanism, including but not limited to fMRI, TMS, tDCS, and computational modeling.
- She is interested in human social behavior and its underlying neural mechanisms, with a particular focus on intergroup behavior, empathy and emotion regulation in social context, how individuals learn in social setting, and how individuals are influenced by social environments and culture.
Key Papers
- Kang, P., Moisa, M., Lindström, B. et al. Causal involvement of dorsomedial prefrontal cortex in learning the predictability of observable actions. NatureCommunications,15, 8305 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-52559-0
- Kang, P., Tobler, P., Dayan, P.Bayesian reinforcement learning: A basic overview. (2024) Neurobiology of Learning and Memory (Special issue: The Rescorla-Wagner Model: half a century later) 211 (2024): 107924. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nlm.2024.107924.
- Kang, P., Burke, C. J., Tobler, P. N., & Hein, G. (2021). Why we learn less from observing outgroups. Journal of Neuroscience, 41(1), 144–152. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0926-20.2020