Poverty isn’t just financial—it’s a cognitive burden that traps people in a vicious cycle. Our research reveals how poverty consumes cognitive resources and hijacks attention, focusing on immediate concerns like bills while neglecting opportunities like financial aid. This process leads to suboptimal choices, impaired performance, and short-term thinking that can perpetuate poverty.

To break this cycle, we pioneer cash-transfer interventions to promote cognitive performance and behavioral outcomes in low-income individuals. We investigate the power of unconditional cash transfers to help individuals experiencing homelessness. We also advance guaranteed basic income models to reduce poverty and help people thrive.

How do we nudge people toward more sustainable behaviors? Our research unlocks the power of cognitive principles to boost pro-environmental action. We have developed a meta-analytic framework pinpointing six cognitive dimensions (attention, perception, memory, effort, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation) to guide effective nudge and sludge interventions.

We have created a large number of innovative and high-impact behaivoral interventions like convenience, real-time feedback, probabilistic rewards, viusal reminders, sustainability education, and tailored messaging based on audience segmentation to promote zero waste, composting, circular economy, and biodiversity conservation across individual, social, and system levels.

How do we turn environmental awareness into action? We have developed a cognitive framework to reveal how personal beliefs and motivations shape how we view climate information and act on it, what cognitive biases and blindspots may arise, and what interventions can help address these biases.

A recent innovation from our lab is a happy climate approach that identifies sweet spots of climate action that also increases human happiness. This idea can revolutionize global climate strategies, turning cognitive insights into bold, joyful action for a sustainable future.

How does the mind make sense of environmental patterns to drive sustainable choices? Our pioneering research on statistical learning (how we detect environmental regularities) uncovers its profound cognitive impacts. We examine how statistical learning shapes cognition: it captures attention persistently, fuses object representations, reduces numerosity estimatation, updates object representation, creates new associations, and generates conjunctive predictions.

These cognitive insights fuel real-world sustainability. For example, consistent bin placements boost recycling speed and accuracy. Similarly, spatial patterns in building layouts improve carbon footprint estimates, countering misperceptions. This work not only decodes the mind's pattern-learning prowess but also transforms sustainability practices, from urban planning to waste management, using basic cognitive research to spark global change.