Welcome to the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory!

Our lab philosophy is that science is about ideas and discovery, not about the people behind them. We focus on enjoying the scientific process itself: 

generating ideas, conducting experiments, refining and discussing our ideas.  

Research in our lab is within the field of cognitive neuroscience. The majority of our research has focused on the neural bases of language and executive 

function in young adults. While we continue with this work, our main current focus aims to understand neurocognitive changes associated with normal aging 

and early Alzheimer’s disease (AD). This work is made possible through our affiliation with UK’s Sanders-Brown Center on Aging (SBCoA), one of the 

nation’s leading centers on aging, and one of the 10 original AD Centers funded by NIH. We are particularly interested in understanding age-related changes 

from the perspective of brain pathways. Toward that end, a multimodal imaging approach is employed, making use of functional magnetic resonance imaging, 

and structural imaging methods such as volumetric measurement and diffusion tensor imaging. Combining data from these different imaging modalities may 

help reflect the distributed set of structural and functional systems supporting cognition and how they change as a result of healthy aging and dementia.  

Our work related to dementia is primarily focused on preclinical stages of AD. One aim in this line of work is to attempt to understand brain changes that may

precede cognitive declines in the development of AD. For example, we are attempting to understand neural correlates of genetic and familial risk factors in 

preclinical AD. More recently, we have become interested in understanding how certain lifestyle variables (e.g., exercise, cognitive stimulation) may slow cognitive 

decline and brain aging. Growing data shows that certain factors appear improve the brain’s ability to cope with age-related neurodegenerative changes, mitigating 

its effects on cognition. A greater understanding about these potential cognitive reserve variables, and their neural bases, may help promote healthier lifestyles in 

aging and improve the sensitivity of early dementia diagnosis. In our previous work in this area, we have found that seniors who are aerobically fit appear to have 

stronger brain connectivity than their aerobically unfit peers. We have also found evidence from both functional and structural brain imaging suggesting that lifelong 

bilingualism may contribute to cognitive reserve in aging.