Corbin Cunningham is a Distinguished Science of Learning Pre-doctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences. In general, his research is focused on understanding how experiences (e.g., learning to ignore) influence attentional processes. Corbin takes an interdisciplinary approach to solving these problems by incorporating methods from vision science (e.g., psychophysics), cognitive neuroscience (e.g., EEG), and health science (e.g., dietary intake screeners and anthropometric measures such as body mass index and body fat percentage).
During his graduate work, Corbin has been investigating how learning influences cognitive processes. Specifically, he is interested in understanding how naturally occuring goals, learned over the lifetime, influence visual attention. One interesting case study is the strong attraction that individuals have towards energy-dense foods (e.g., high-fat, high-calorie). By understanding the diversity of food behaviors among individuals and how food behaviors differentially influence implicit attentional biases towards energy-dense foods, Corbin hopes to elucidate the cognitive underpinnings of dietary behavior. A long term goal of this work is to use these findings to better inform theories of attention and to improve weight management programs.