Research in our lab examines the psychology and neuroscience of what motivates people, how to improve learning, how people make decisions, and how people manage their physical, emotional, and financial health and well being across the life span. The long-term goal of our work is to improve health and well being in daily life, especially in older age. We aim to identify psychological and neurobiological strengths at all stages of adulthood that can be used to enhance everyday decision making and behavior change. Our earlier work was heavily focused on financial decision making and decision neuroscience. We are continuing to study financial choice and do some brain imaging, but most of the work in the lab now uses a translational behavioral approach that identifies psychological mechanisms (social, cognitive, affective) in well-controlled laboratory experiments that are subsequently tested in field experiments and then used in large-scale accessible interventions to motivate behavior change or behavior maintenance. There are three active lines of research in our lab.

memory and decision making in the aging brain

Through a collaboration with Roberto Cabeza, Felipe de Brigard, and Beth Marsh, we are evaluating how changes in motivation and memory affect decision making across adulthood. This line of work combines behavioral and neuroimaging (MRI, fMRI, DTI) measurement of a range of individual differences variables, measures of memory ability, and decision making preferences. This work is focused on both financial investment decision making as well as consumer decision making. We are evaluating the role that baseline memory abilities and memory-based interventions affect decisions about the allocation of financial resources over time and product purchasing decisions. This work is currently funded by the National Institute on Aging.

health behavior change across adulthood

We, and many others, have documented the neuroprotective effects of physical activity in older age. We’ve completed an initial line of work in the lab focused on using what we've learned about motivation and aging to identify optimal incentives to increase physical activity, especially in middle-aged and older adulthood. These studies involve marketing/communications-based experiments to test the effectiveness of health messages, development of personalized electronic messaging to enhance motivation, and daily monitoring of physical activity in everyday life. We are seeking new funding to extend this line of work.

The pandemic catalyzed a new line of research in our lab that developed a translational basic-to-applied research pipeline that, through connections with collaborators at Georgia Tech, the University of Maryland, the CDC, and HHS, had nearly immediate nationwide impact on public health communication targeting primarily risk behavior and decision making in everyday life. Through a series of studies we identified psychological levers that were critical to helping average Americans learn about pandemic-related risks and adjust their everyday decision making and behavior according. This work led to the development of two web-based tools (one to learn about virus exposure risk and another to estimate immunity) that were visited by millions of users. Our findings were used to inform communications strategies at the CDC and HHS. We are continuing to develop this line of work into a more generalizable strategy for studying health behavior change outside of the pandemic context. We’ve pursuing launching a startup using this model.

motivation, learning, decision making, and higher education effectiveness

A new line of work in our lab is using the tools of cognitive and social psychology to optimize classroom learning, identify non-traditional innovative ways to holistically educate college students to prepare effective and healthy global citizens, and evaluate new models for graduate education that reduce inequities and increase the long-term success, health, and well being of graduate students. The work focused on undergraduates is currently being developed through partnerships within internal units at Duke (Office of Undergraduate Education, Student Affairs) and the work focused on graduate students is currently funded by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.