Five 2019 MOST Columbus and Einstein grants bring NTD 90 million to TMU

With the Columbus program’s funding, Assistant Professor Cheng-Yi Chen expects to enter multicultural collaborations to design interactive games and intervention models for infants to help develop their character. He wants to examine neurological development mechanisms in the brain related to morality and ethics, such as fairness, empathy, altruism and generosity, as well as important social environmental factors like parents’ value systems and their influence on children’s neurological processing. He also wants to set up behaviour prediction models using artificial intelligence.

Assistant Professor Chen says psychology’s social learning theories show that children will learn and impart inappropriate and immoral actions (such as aggression and violence) through mimicry, and this is an important reason to lead by example. Yet he also examines this idea from a more optimistic angle, designing appropriate interventions for children to promote character development. As prevention is better than cure, effectively reducing possible violence in society is the most fundamentally effective approach. He seeks to encourage morality from the infant stage using research based on behavior, neurophysiology and cognition.

This research project will combine vast cross-cultural neuroimaging data and behaviour indicators from the U.S., France and Taiwan to investigate neurological activities when subjects process information related to justice and ethics. This can illuminate the origin and development of brain socialization, placing particular emphasis on common evolutionary features of character development shared by all humans.

Assistant Professor Cheng-Yi Chen, College of Public Health