Research

At the O’BRAIN Lab, we assume that indi­vid­ual weight sta­tus is the result of a com­plex inter­ac­tion of (at least) these dif­fer­ent fac­tors:

  • indi­vid­ual behav­iour (e.g. eat­ing behav­iour, deci­sion-mak­ing)
  • char­ac­ter­is­tics of the envi­ron­ment (e.g. food sup­ply, pos­si­bil­i­ties for phys­i­cal activ­i­ty)
  • indi­vid­ual pre­dis­po­si­tion (such as genet­ic sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ty)

The goal of the O’BRAIN Lab is to dis­en­tan­gle these inter­ac­tions by draw­ing upon mul­ti­ple sci­en­tif­ic dis­ci­plines such as neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy, psy­chol­o­gy, cog­ni­tive sci­ence, math­e­mat­ics and med­i­cine. Our inter­dis­ci­pli­nary research is con­duct­ed in two places:

  1. Leipzig (Ger­many), at the Max-Planck-Insti­tute for Cog­ni­tive and Brain Sci­ences, in coop­er­a­tion with the Uni­ver­si­ty of Leipzig
  2. Helsin­ki (Fin­land), Depart­ment of Psy­chol­o­gy and Logo­pe­dics, Fac­ul­ty of Med­i­cine, Uni­ver­si­ty of Helsin­ki

RESOURCES & INFRASTRUCTURE

The O’BRAIN Lab has access to a range of method­olog­i­cal devices:

With the help of Magnet­ic Reso­nance Imag­ing (MRI) the O’BRAIN Lab aims to go one step fur­ther and explore neur­al cor­re­lates of these obe­si­ty-relat­ed behav­iour­al dif­fer­ences. All MRI-tech­niques use strong but harm­less mag­net­ic fields to image the human brain. Stud­ies of the O’BRAIN Lab make use of MR-scan­ners at mag­net­ic field strengths of 3 and 7 Tes­la.

In basic terms, eye track­ing is the mea­sure­ment of eye activ­i­ty. An eye track­er is a device that uses pro­jec­tion pat­terns and opti­cal sen­sors to gath­er data about eye posi­tion, gaze direc­tion or eye move­ments.

Our stud­ies com­bine data from ques­tion­naires with oth­er behav­iour­al and bio­log­i­cal mea­sures from our par­tic­i­pants. We use dig­i­tal tools to col­lect this infor­ma­tion which in turn is stored secure­ly on Euro­pean GDPR-com­pat­i­ble servers.

COLLABORATIONS

PARTNERS & FUNDING

We are grate­ful for the sup­port and ongo­ing fund­ing by these part­ners: