Current Studies | Penn State College of Health and Human Development

The CogNEATO Lab is currently conducting the following studies:

A girl is peeping at an appetizing stack of freshly baked chocolate cookies on the table.

Study of Brain, Reward, and Kids’ Eating (Study BRAKE)

The proposed research aims to determine if reinforcement learning phenotype (i.e., sign- and goal-tracking) is 1) associated with adiposity due to its influence on neural food cue reactivity and 2) associated with reward-driven overconsumption and meal intake due to its influence on eating behaviors.

Home Observation of Meals and Environment (HOME Bytes)

This project aims to build a research platform designed by Dr. Timothy Brick’s Real Time Science Lab to support the study of eating behaviors in the home by utilizing smart phones and implementing automatic identification of eating behaviors.

Infant eating healthy food. self feeding

Computational Modeling of Meal Microstructure

This project aims to validate novel computational approaches for modeling meal microstructure (e.g., bites, meal duration). This project aims to validate the use of video-coded bites to estimate cumulative intake curves (CIC), which will expand the utility of CIC to children and more naturalistic settings outside the lab.

Appetitive Traits and Brain Structure in Children

This project is based on secondary analysis of data that was compiled across five studies from Dr. Kathleen Keller’s Metabolic Kitchen and Children’s Eating Behavior Laboratory. The compiled data include demographic information, measured child anthropometrics, and parent reported child appetitive traits, parent and child eating behaviors, and parental feeding behaviors.