Research Highlights

A Seed and Soil model of Loneliness in Alzheimer’s disease

What happens to the brain when you start feeling lonely? Like... really really lonely? Well, we propose that it isn't good! According to our model, loneliness might serve as a negative type of stress the pushes your brain a little closer to that of an Alzheimer's disease brain. Brain activity becomes toxic and affects critical brain regions in nodes of a network related to the Default Mode. While research on loneliness and the brain is still rather new, the evidence of the science thus far suggests that multiple brain networks are impacted across the life course both in health and pathology. This information can provide further support to guide clinicians on how to educate their patients on the importance of maintaining social relationships throughout their lives. Recommendations to improve social connection include engaging in volunteer activities, recreational activities, scheduling regular activities with friends and family, engaging with your neighbors and community, and simply getting out of the house and into environments with other people present.

Published in Neural Regeneration Research

Using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to promote long-term foreign language vocabulary learning

How do you learn a new language? Well stimulating the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) helps! It helps especially when your brain might not be performing optimally, such as when you haven't had enough sleep... or never really get enough sleep! And sorry left handers. You also show a natural disadvantage, so stimulating your brain might be necessary, too. Why does stimulate help? Our follow-up study suggests the DLPFC helps people pay attention to the details when learning a new language, like the sound of new words and how the new word is spelled. It also might help in th ememory consolidation process. Read more about what we found and stay tuned for updates!

Published in Brain and Cognition

Is There More to Metamemory? An Argument for Two Specialized Monitoring Abilities

Some have argued that the ability to introspect into our own thoughts defines being human. Indeed, understanding how we inspect, evaluate, and use the outcomes of our own thought processes can be crucial for learning new information and making everyday decisions. For example, students need to assess both their learning and the accuracy of retrieved information to succeed. Assessing skills acquired during specialized training and applying this expertise on the job is crucial, especially when those skills are used to save lives, such as medical professions. Nobody wants to be operated on by a surgeon that inaccurately assessed how well they learned a new surgical procedure. But what if we have misrepresented this introspection process by overgeneralizing it? We argue that this process has been overextended, thereby missing key influences and biases that affect this process at different times. These differences can impact educational practices, training programs, and on-the-job decisions.

Published Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

Sources of Nonreplicability in Aging Ethnoracial Health Disparities Research

This paper provides our perspective on three key sources of nonreplicability in ethnoracial health disparities research among older adults: 1) what is lost in creating monolithic groups rather than identifying subgroups of minorities, 2) understanding aging from the perspective of intersecting identities, and 3) biases of research materials. We also provide recommendations to increase replicability in aging research with respect to the challenges outlined. Approaching questions on aging from a health disparities lens, can both increase the generalizability of research outcomes and improve initiatives of social justice that are long overdue.

Published in Psychology & Aging

Cellphone Addiction Explains How Cellphones Impair Learning for Lecture Materials

This study investigated whether cellphone-related anxiety, addiction, and disconnection were related to distraction and learning as well as how practical educational policies could minimize negative effects. Our findings showed that students who were allowed to use their cellphone experienced a greater degree of distraction and worse test performance than those given no overt instructions (control). Only cellphone addiction and distractedness played key roles in impacting the effects of condition on test performance. Thus, allowing cellphones in class may exacerbate existing cellphone addiction behaviors and impair learning.

Published in Applied Cognitive Psychology

Memory Reactivation and Aging

One of the causes of age-related declines in episodic memory might be the ability to reactivate features in memory that were encoded during the original perceptual experience. In a study published in NeuroImage, my collaborators and used a memory paradigm aimed to reactivate features from complex visual images. We found that mean levels of brain activity showed age-related declines in critical regions underlying object and spatial context processing that overlapped with visual perception regions. Although there were more similarities in reactivation of brain activity common to both younger and older adults than differences, these results suggest that some age-related differences in episodic memory could be due to deficits in the ability to reactivate perceptual features in memory.

Retrieval Monitoring in the Prefrontal Cortex

Older adults often exhibit elevated distortion or false memories, possibly due to declines in the ability to carefully search and evaluate retrieved information known as retrieval monitoring. In a study published in Cerebral Cortex, I found the poorer memory accuracy was associated with hyperactivation in prefrontal brain regions thought to be involved in retrieval monitoring processes. However, in retrieval conditions that do not require heavy demands on cognition, older adults are able to attain similar levels of memory accuracy as younger adults likely because they do not have to rely on prefrontal cortex.

Cognitive Intervention: Retrieval Monitoring Autobiographical Memories

Older adults are less successfully able to carefully search and evaluate retrieved information to ensure accurate memory (known as retrieval monitoring). One reason for these declines might be because retrieval monitoring is much harder for information that has less rich or distinctive details. I tested whether increasing the amount of studied details would lead to better retrieval monitoring in younger and older adults. In a study published in Psychology and Aging, I found that while younger adults were able to take advantage of the additional study details to improve retrieval monitoring accuracy, older adults could not. This finding suggests that at least part of the age-related impairments in episodic memory is due to faulty decision processing during memory retrieval.

The Entropic Brain

Recent theories on brain dynamics propose that seemingly random fluctuations inherent in brain activity, or entropy, might serve as a marker of better cognition and mental health. However, studies have often failed to characterize the nature of random fluctuations of brain activity in healthy young adults, especially using BOLD fMRI signals. In a study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, I showed that the degree of entropy is network dependent, and scales with the strength and extent of resting-state functional connectivity. These results suggest that the random fluctuations of brain signals might serve as a complementary measure to better understand information processing, which in turn should be related to cognitive decline such as that found in aged adults or Alzheimer’s disease.

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to promote long-term foreign language vocabulary learning

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