Browsing Faculty of Arts and Sciences by Keyword "Behavioral sciences"
Now showing items 1-17 of 17
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Assessing the Implementation of U.S. Programs and Policies for the Prevention of Food Insecurity and Obesity in School Settings
(2023-06-01)Five million children in the U.S. live in households experiencing food insecurity and may face numerous structural and environmental barriers to health that elevate the risks of physical, developmental and emotional harm, ... -
Dynamic dopaminergic activity controls the timing of self-timed movement.
(2021-05-14)What makes us move? Human movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease have long suggested a vital role for dopamine in movement initiation, but there exists surprisingly little evidence connecting endogenous dopaminergic ... -
Essays in Behavioral Economics
(2013-03-14)Essays in this dissertation cover three topics in behavioral economics: social preferences, ambiguity aversion and self-control. The first essay, based on work with Aurelie Ouss, studies the behavior of individuals making ... -
Essays in Behavioral Economics
(2021-07-12)This dissertation presents three studies in behavioral economics, with a focus on factors that influence how individuals make financial decisions. Paper one examines the impact of the payday cycle on commitment decisions. ... -
Essays in the Economics of Education and Financial Inclusion
(2021-03-05)Consumer financial wellbeing is a universal concern. To optimize their financial health, people need effective tools for saving, borrowing, and investing, as well as income to put towards them. These tools and policies in ... -
Essays on Precommitment
(2022-11-23)Precommitment is a way for someone to impose certain constraints on or alter various incentives, in order to encourage (or discourage) future behavior. Precommitment primarily is situated in the literature on self-control, ... -
Essays on the Behavior and Performance of Retail Investors
(2022-05-19)In recent years, retail trading in stocks, cryptocurrencies and other assets has become significantly more popular, and since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the shift to a work-from-home regime, it has in many ways ... -
Essays on the utilization of health and social services among low-income families in the United States
(2021-07-12)Interventions aimed at supporting low-income families of newborns and increasing access to mental health services in both the prenatal and postpartum periods can have positive effects on child health and development. ... -
Evidence from behavioral experiments: Information theory and discourse-based accounts of long-distance dependencies
(2022-03-29)For decades, linguists and psychologists have sought to understand why some long-distance dependencies sound grammatical while others less so, and how people process them. In this dissertation, I investigate these puzzles ... -
Exploring Strategies to Promote a Healthier Food Environment
(2022-05-12)Excess weight, which affects over 70% of the population in the United States, has been associated with a plethora of chronic diseases, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, some cancers, and mortality. As posited by ... -
Prediction and Learning for Postural Control in Mice
(2023-06-01)Postural control is crucial for maintaining balance and body position in response to both self-generated and externally triggered perturbations. Studies in humans have shown that anticipation of predictable postural ... -
The role of sexual imprinting in speciation: lessons from deer mice (genus Peromyscus)
(2014-10-21)Sexual imprinting, the process of learning mate preferences at a young age, could promote speciation by reducing attraction to individuals from divergent populations or species, consequently creating or maintaining ... -
The Sensory and Behavioral Basis of Drosophila Larval Phototaxis
(2013-02-25)The avoidance of light by fly larvae has been studied for over a century. Early 20th-century investigators found that larvae crawled away from light sources incident at an angle (e.g. a sunlit window). Contemporary studies ... -
Social Behavior and Gene Expression Disturbances in Mouse Models of Angelman Syndrome and Idic15 Autism
(2014-06-06)Reciprocal changes in UBE3A gene dosage cause two neurodevelopmental disorders. Maternally inherited deletions of UBE3A cause Angelman syndrome, characterized by intellectual disability, motor defects, seizures, and a ... -
Task-Dependent Mouse Behavioral Dynamics in Navigational Decision-Making
(2023-11-21)Effective navigation in their environment requires animals to process and integrate diverse inputs across varying timescales while adaptively responding to their surroundings. This ability to integrate information over a ... -
The Evolution of Ineffective Technologies in Human Societies – A Cognitive and Cultural Evolutionary Perspective
(2022-04-18)Throughout history and across human societies, people practiced magic, divination, and other objectively ineffective technologies. Why would people engage in these ineffective and often costly practices? In this dissertation, ... -
Thermal navigation in larval zebrafish
(2013-10-08)Navigation in complex environments requires selection of appropriate actions as a function of local cues. To gain a quantitative and mechanistic understanding of zebrafish thermal navigation, we have developed a novel assay ...