Welcome to UMKC Child Lab!

Our research mission is to contribute to our society through advancing and sharing knowledge of child development. Our goal is to better understand how children grow to be adaptive members of our society. We believe that our research will benefit our society by improving children’s healthy and adaptive development.

We are committed to discover how children learn important information about the world around them, and make decisions based on learned information.

We apply various methods including eye-tracking technology, mouse-tracking paradigm, value-based computational decision-making paradigm, economic games, and behavioral measures to learn children’s development.

In particular, with emphasis on children’s health and well-being, we investigate how obese and healthy weight children make food choices, and how dietary self-control, food advertising literacy, and parents’ eating habits influence children’s unhealthy and healthy food decisions.

With emphasis on children’s social adaptation, we investigate how children make prosocial choices, and how cognitive and affective empathy and maternal sensitivity influence children’s prosocial decisions.

Additionally, we investigate the role of stress in young adults’ eating and prosocial decision-making.

We really appreciate all the families who would like to participate in our research. If you would like to participate in one of our studies, please contact us at (816) 235-6494 or email us at umkc.child@gmail.com. Thank you!