Child Study
Healthy Eating for Healthy Baby Project
This project aims to determine factors influencing the development of early eating habits in 12 to 24-month-old infants. We examine how early food exposure via parental feeding practice and maternal food preferences shape infants’ and toddlers’ eating habits. Using a visual preferential looking paradigm, we explore visual attention to food cues and food preferences experimentally in infant-mother dyads. Examining the early development of food preferences and sensitivity to food cues would allow us to better understand the factors contributing to healthy and unhealthy eating habits, and to formulate early preventative measures of obesity.
Healthy Food Choice Project
This project investigates the mechanism underlying developing eating decisions in children ages 8-12. Using computerized value-based decision-making tasks and mouse-tracking technology, we have examined how taste and health attribute influence food choices in relation to the development of self-control. In addition, we have investigated how televised food commercials influence children’s food choices. We are interested in how improving advertising literacy impacts healthy eating decisions. This project is sought to identify effective strategies for childhood obesity prevention and intervention.
Share My Precious Project: Prosocial Decision-Making
This project investigates the decision-making mechanism of prosocial sharing behavior in children ages 5-8. In particular, we focus on the process of prosocial decision-making to examine how children learn to make prosocial decisions, using value-based decision-making paradigm, eye-tracking, and economic games. We examine the development of prosocial sharing decision-making in relation to empathy, and shared prosociality in mother-child dyads.
Adult Study
Prosocial Decision-Making
This project investigates the decision-making mechanism of prosocial sharing behavior in young adults between the ages of 18-25. In particular, we focus on the different personal and emotional characteristics that might be related to how individuals make prosocial decisions using economic sharing games. This study seeks to better the understanding of why adults make prosocial sharing decisions with anonymous others.
Emotional Eating
This project explores various risk factors for obesity in young adults ages 18-25. Specifically, this study investigates how different personal characteristics and emotional states may be related to a person’s eating behavior. We designed this study so that we may achieve a better understanding of obesity and how it develops in young adults.