Cognitive and Behavioural Science

The Cognitive and Behavioural Science Research Cluster in SSS brings together researchers interested in behavioural sciences, cognition, decision and actions, memory and learning, and brain functions across the development progress of individuals (from infants to students to aged populations). The Cluster includes researchers from behavioural economics, developmental psychology, social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, and sociology. 

Through research sharing activities, the Cluster aims to foster research collaborations and generate research findings and programmes that can help boost healthcare, wellbeing, education, technology advancement, and societal welfare.

The Cluster will be collaborating with LKC Medicine, NBS, Engineering Schools (such as CEE, MAE, and SCSE), research centres such as CRADLE, CLC, ARISE, LILY, NTU-WeBank Joint Research Centre, NTU-LTA Transport Research Centre, and Society for Neuroscience (SfN) Singapore.

Cluster Coordinator

Asst. Prof He Tai-Sen (Economics)

Tai-Sen uses experimental methods to study problems at the intersection of Economics, Finance, and Psychology. His recent research focuses on two interdisciplinary areas: first, how do simple, easy-to-manipulate linguistic interventions influence economic decision-making? Second, what can parents do to foster their children's development in economically important preferences, such as pro-sociality and patience, and skills such as strategic reasoning?
Assoc. Prof Xu Hong (Psychology)Hong's research interests include visual perception and neuroscience; human-computer interaction and computational modelling the neural network for perception, cognition, decision and action.
Cluster Members
Asst. Prof Akshar Saxena (Economics)Akshar's research is in the area of Health Economics, Applied Econometrics, Public Health.
Assoc. Prof Bao Te (Economics)Te's research interest includes experimental economics, bounded rationality, behavioural finance, and real estate economics. His works are published in Economic Journal, European Economic Review, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Real Estate Economics and Research in Experimental Economics.
Assoc. Prof Chan Hiu Dan Alice (SoH-Linguistics & Multilingual Studies)Alice is interested in looking at the underlying cognitive and neuroanatomical mechanisms as well as the genetic bases of these culturally sensitive perceptual patterns and behaviours. Her current work also looks at possible neurophysiological realisations that would support the Whorfian hypothesis, with a specific interest in Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese, as well as bilingual and multilingual communities.
Asst. Prof Charle​s Or (Psychology)Charles's research focuses on visual perception of faces, motion, and form, using electrophysiology, psychophysics, and computational modelling as tools. Currently, he is investigating how face detection and face identification can be accomplished rapidly under various circumstances, such as varying viewing angles and the presence of colour, using a novel and objective paradigm of fast periodic visual stimulation during recording of high-density scalp electroencephalograms (EEG). He is also interested in studying cultural variations in visual perception.
Prof Chen Shen-Hsing Annabel (Psychology)

Annabel is President's Chair Professor in Psychology and the Director for Centre for Research & Development in learning. She is a Clinical Neuropsychologist and conducts research examining ways to optimise neurocognition based on neuropsychology principles and employing neuroimaging techniques. Her current research interests include:
• Neurophysiological changes in the aging brain for learning in
- Language, memory and executive control networks
- Neuromodulation to optimise and/or enhance brain functions through
• Cognitive training (including motor control training)
• Non-invasive Brain Stimulation (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS), Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS))
• Contribution of the cerebellum to higher cognitive functions in learning
- Working memory, emotion and motivation, and music in healthy and atypical groups (ASD, Dyslexia, ADHD)
- Developing interventions using cognitive training and brain-computer interface (BCI)

Asst. Prof Darren Yeo (Psychology)Darren uses behavioural experiments and neuroimaging (fMRI) to investigate how children and adults learn and think about mathematical symbols, concepts, and skills, as well as how and why individuals differ in learning and competence. In another line of work, he studies the relative effectiveness of various learning and instructional strategies (e.g., retrieval practice and use of incorrect worked examples) to inform how individual and classroom learning can be better structured to make knowledge stick.
Senior Lecturer Dr. Francis Wong (SoH-Linguistics and Multilingual Studies)Francis’s current research focuses on studying, using techniques from brain imaging and artificial language learning paradigms, how speech processing is supported by a network of brain areas. 
Assoc. Prof Ho Moon-Ho Ringo (Psychology) ​Ringo's research interests are concerned with the development and application of quantitative methods, in particular, multilevel modelling, resampling methods, structural equation modelling, and time-series analysis in the neural and behavioural sciences. His current research work focuses on neuroinformatics research, in particular, the theoretical development and applications of multivariate time series analysis method for extracting meaningful information from complex brain imaging data.
Assoc. Prof Jonathan Tan (Economics)Behavioural Game Theory, in particular boundedly rational reasoning and social preferences in games, especially but non-exclusively in dynamic games. Experimental Economics is Jonathan’s primary data collection method, which he also complements with questionnaire data from social psychological inventories or from the German Social Economic Panel (SOEP). He also uses experimental methods to explore individual differences in personality or socio-cognitions and cultural (in particular religious and ethnic) as influences on strategic behaviour in groups and society. Health Economics, Public Economics, and Industrial Organisation are some of the main areas to which he applies behavioural and experimental insight. His recent projects involve organ and blood donation, public project collaboration, socially responsible investment, future transport systems, legislative bargaining, and R&D races.
Asst. Prof Luo Lizhu (Psychology)Lizhu is a psychologist and neuroscientist focused on affective neuroscience and clinical psychology. She conducts interdisciplinary research using psychological methods and task-related fMRI to explore the behavioural and neural mechanisms of youth psychopathology, particularly the emotional and cognitive processing issues related to various aspects of psychological well-being, including depression in teenagers.
Asst. Prof Ma Xiangyu (Sociology)Xiangyu's research involves the use of computational techniques to study the processes of production, consumption, and evaluation in “cultural” markets, such as the literary arts, televisual arts, and music. His most recent work examines the semantic ambiguity around the concept of taste and audience reception of authenticity within creative industries. His writings have been published in outlets such as Poetics and Cultural Sociology.
Prof Nattavudh Powdthavee (Economics)Nick's research interests include the economics of mental health and well-being; behavioural economics; fairness; AI and human interaction; climate change and sustainability.
Asst. Prof Nurul Amillin Hussain (Sociology)Amillin's research interests include sustainability, renewable energy transitions, climate change and climate change projections, and human-technology interactions in smart cities.
Asst. Prof Olivia Choy (Psychology)Olivia adopts an interdisciplinary approach that examines biological factors, together with psychological and social environmental variables, to gain a more complete understanding of what underlies criminal behaviour in adults and antisocial behaviour in children, as well as treatments to reduce these behaviours. Some of her current research work involves a collaboration with the Singapore Prison Service and the Central Narcotics Bureau. She is also a board member of the three-generational, longitudinal Joint Child Health Project in Mauritius.
Asst. Prof Paul Victor Patinadan (Psychology)Paul Victor specialises in health research. He holds appointments as a Health Professions Educator with the National Healthcare Group, a Clinical Teacher at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, and is also an Association for Death Education and Counselling (ADEC) certified Thanatologist. As an interdisciplinary mixed-methods researcher, Paul Victor specialises in psychosocial interventions, positive psychology and wellbeing, implementation science, holistic education in care-ecosystems, and how the medical humanities are employed for humanistic pedagogy. He has worked on projects with a focus on grief and bereavement, community and critical health psychology, psychosociospiritual wellbeing for patients and their families, and evaluative research for health organisations.
Assoc. Prof Qiu Lin (Psychology)Lin's research interests include Personality Psychology, Cultural Psychology, Cyberpsychology, Environmental Psychology, and Computational Social Science. His work has appeared in top-tier journals including Psychological Science, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Journal of Research in Personality, Computers in Human Behaviour, Journal of Computational Social Science, and Cyberpsychology, Behaviour, and Social Networking. He is Associate Editor of Journal of Computational Social Science.
Assoc. Prof Setoh Pei Pei (Psychology) Pei Pei is the Director of the Early Cognition Lab at NTU, and she leads the Social Science team in Singapore’s largest prospective birth cohort study, Growing Up in Singapore Towards Healthy Outcomes, GUSTO. Her current research focuses on how family and parenting influence children and adolescents' mental health outcomes.
Asst. Prof Shannon Ang (Sociology)Shannon primarily uses quantitative methods to pursue research interests in life course sociology, focusing on the health and social lives of older adults. This includes the social support and social participation (including online participation) of older adults, and their implications for mental and physical health outcomes. He also examines population trends in areas such as social cohesion, union formation (e.g., marriage, cohabitation), and how ’linked lives’ (e.g., spouses) may affect each other.
Assoc. Prof Sun Hsiao-Li Shirley (Sociology) ​Shirley studies family, population, genomic science, and medicine in global contexts through the concepts of citizenship and "othering". She has special research interests in science, technology, and society. Her latest publication is titled “Socio-economics of personalised medicine in Asia” (2017, Routledge), where she draws on interviews with practicing physicians and medical research scientists in Asia about genome-based precision medicine.
Assoc. Prof Suzy Styles (Psychology) ​Suzy investigates how we develop systems of meaning which connect up words like “cat” and “dog” in a way that influences moment-to-moment language comprehension. She also investigates the interface between the sounds of words and their meanings, looking at how viewing a picture can trigger in the mind the idea of its name, and whether some pictures 'look more like' what they are called than others. She is also interested in how each person’s individual’s language experience contributes to their processing of natural language, with an interest in how different writing systems and different sound systems shape perception and the underlying representation of language.
Lecturer Dr. Swati Sharma (Economics)Swati contributes towards teaching the ICC course on sustainability. She is an interdisciplinary researcher, and her research lies at the intersection of economics, clean energy, and sustainability. The present focus of her research is to understand human behaviour and decision-making in the domains of clean energy, climate change, and sustainability by mainly using tools from economics. Her work also focuses on understanding crucial determinants of climate change policy, global agreement adoption, and sustainable development goals.
Asst. Prof Tang Cheng Keat (Economics)Cheng Keat is an applied microeconomist and his research interests include Urban and Housing Economics, Transportation Economics, Environmental Economics, and Economics of Crime. Specifically, his research focuses on quantifying the externalities of driving, measuring the cost of climate change, valuing non-market amenities using revealed preference framework, understanding how neighbourhood quality can influence various socio-economic outcomes, and conducting policy evaluations intended to minimise negative externalities in cities (e.g congestion, crime, pollution etc).
Asst. Prof Tan Chin Hong (Psychology)Chin Hong is an interdisciplinary cognitive neuroscientist whose research interest lies broadly in using neuroimaging techniques, genetics, and psychosocial factors to understand the earliest risk markers of neurodegenerative diseases and cognitive decline.
Prof Victoria Leong Vik Ee (Psychology) Victoria is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist who is interested in the neuro-social processes that support learning during early life, such as the synchrony that naturally occurs between mothers and infants. She currently heads the Baby-LINC (Learning through Interpersonal Neural Communication) Lab at the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge where she uses concurrent electroencephalgraphy (EEG) with mothers and infants to study how mother-infant neural activity can become naturally synchronised during social interactions, and how this synchronisation could help babies to learn from their mothers.
Assoc. Prof Wan Ching (Psychology)Trained as a social and cultural psychologist, Ching's research examines the psychological processes in which culture and the self-interact. Her recent work examines how individuals’ identity relates to their representations of their culture, and group similarities and differences in such processes. Her work employs mixed methods from qualitative interviews to quantitative social psychological surveys and experiments to computational text analysis.
Asst. Prof Wang Wenjie (Economics)Wenjie's research interests include Econometric Theory, Machine Learning, Policy Evaluation, and Behavioural Economics. Recently, he is working on research topics such as high-dimensional instrumental variables (IV) models with possibly weak instruments, cluster-robust bootstrap inference for IV quantile regressions, and spatial/network-dependence robust inference methods for high-dimensional models. He is also working on the empirical application of machine learning and network analysis to healthcare and environment issues.
Asst. Prof Wei Xing Toh (Psychology)Wei Xing's research interests include understanding the determinants and consequences of self-regulatory processes, primarily executive functions and emotion regulation, as well as how these processes unfold over the life span.
Asst. Prof Yan Jubo (Economics)Jubo’s research interests include behavioural economics, experimental economics, and applied microeconomics. Currently, his research focuses on 1) The impact of behavioural factors (e.g., loss aversion, salience, and social preference) on individuals’ responses to public policies; 2) The role of motivated reasoning in individual and group decision making; 3) Policy evaluation in a development context (e.g., human resource allocation and environmental issues).
Asst. Prof Yeo Xiong Wei, Jonathan (Economics)Jonathan's research interests are in Behavioural and Experimental Economics, especially with regards to how intra and inter-group interactions are influenced by social, psychological and cultural factors. He is particularly interested in how these interact with economic factors to influence outcomes like inequality and efficiency.
Asst. Prof Yeow Hwee Chua (Economics)Yeow Hwee is the Deputy Director of the Economic Growth Centre at NTU and the Assistant Honorary Secretary of the Economics Society of Singapore. His research interests lie in the intersection of macroeconomics and finance, with a focus on topics in household finance, sustainable finance, behavioural macroeconomics, and monetary economics.
Prof Yohanes Eko Riyanto (Economics) Eko's current research is in the areas of Experimental and Behavioral Economics; and Applied Microeconomics. He is currently working on various topics investigating the economics of charitable giving using laboratory controlled and field experiments, social preferences, mechanisms to enhance cooperation and coordination in social dilemma settings, experimental asset markets, and many others. 
Asst. Prof Yu Junhong (Psychology)Junhong is the Director of the Cognitive and Brain Health Laboratory. His research revolves broadly around neuropsychology and cognitive aging. In particular, he makes use of multimodal neuroimaging to study neurocognitive disorders, superior cognitive aging, neural predictors of cognitive decline and cognitive enhancement interventions.