Welcome to the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory!

We investigate the neural organization of core cognitive processes in young adults and how this organization may change with normal aging and mild dementia. We have been pursuing 4 main lines of research: (1) language processes/structures that allow us to recognize visual words; (2) cognitive control processes/structures that allow us to flexibly alternate between multiple tasks (3) how the cognitive/neural organization of these processes changes with aging; (4) pre-symptomatic detection of dementia.

We adopt a multimodal imaging approach, including fMRI, DTI and structural MRI (see our Publications page for more details). For example, we have explored the neural bases of age-related changes in task switching using a combined fMRI-DTI approach (Gold et al., 2008). In the area of pre-symptomatic detection of dementia, we have been using structural MRI to explore volumetric changes (Martin et al., 2008) and DTI to explore changes in white matter microstructure (Smith et al., 2008).

We gratefully acknowledge funding support from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation in carrying out these projects.