The project aims to design and test a new, feasible strategy to combat misinformation based on naturally occurring cognitive biases, namely the similarity between misinformation and its contradiction.

LessSugar4Kids aims to address the problem of excessive sugar intake in Portuguese children by examining the underlying individual (e.g., child's food preferences and perceptions) and contextual (e.g., parents'/teachers' attitudes towards sugar intake) determinants. It is critical to combine the parents, teachers', and children's perspectives to attain this goal.

  According to the WHO, the excessive intake of free sugars - sugar added to foods and beverages by the manufacturer, cook or consumer - is associated to unhealthy dietary habits, weight gain, increased risk of noncommunicable diseases and oral health problems. Portugal has a high prevalence of adult overweight and obesity and over 95% of the population exceeds the WHO's free sugars intake limit (below 10% of the daily total energy intake). This projects takes on a multimethod approach to examine the eating habits and objective knowledge about the sugar content of processed foods, how such information is processed, and experimentally examines contextual (e.g., sugar-content labeling) and individual (e.g., attitudes, regulatory focus) factors underlying the perception and consumption of different types of high-sugar processed foods. These findings will be highly informative to understand the current problem of high free sugars intake and to design future interventions to address it.  

The research project investigates the social nature of memory and the distinctive mechanisms underlying collaborative memory process. It focuses on two forms of social memory phenomena that have been robustly demonstrated: (a) effects of socially shared encoding on individual memory, and (b) effects of group collaboration in memory tasks. The process underlying effects of socially shared encoding and interpersonal collaboration on memory is examined through five tasks. Task1 examines the previously proposed cognitive process: the stimuli that are experienced together with relevant others receive more attention and elaboration, thus increasing their accessibility. Task 2 explores affiliative-relational motivation by which cognitive processes are harnessed to fulfill our goals in a given social context. Task 3 and 4 use a new paradigm examining the effects of manipulating representations formed at encoding on a cued recall task. Task 5 explores distributed memory (i.e. whether elaborative efforts made by one group member can enhance the memory of other group members).