Dr. Ding Xiao Pan joined our department in October 2016. She obtained her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from East China Normal University, China. Prior to starting her position with NUS, she was a postdoc at University of Toronto, Canada, and an associate professor at Zhejiang Normal University, China.

The central question guiding Xiao Pan’s research is how children acquire moral behaviour and how to facilitate its development. As a starting point in addressing this complex issue, she has focused on the topic of lying both because of its theoretical implications for understanding children’s moral development, and because of its practical importance for legal, clinical, and educational settings.

She employs both behavioural and cognitive neuroscience methods in her research. For neuroimaging work, she is currently using an emerging technique called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which uses near-infrared light to record the neural activity of children’s brain. fNIRS is very safe and comfortable for children, allowing us to get a glimpse of how a child’s brain changes and develops.