How does the human brain allow us to react adaptively to a wide variety of situations and tasks? And why does this extremely flexible system fail in seemingly simple situations? Everyday examples of these limits include our inability to pay attention to our work and the TV at the same time, our poor driving when we speak on the phone (even hands-free!), and our forgetting details of a photo right after we see it.
My research aims to understand the cognitive and neural bases of the paradoxical, flexible-yet-limited nature of human cognition. My work has mainly focused on healthy young adults, but will expand to include other populations, with the goal of learning how to ameliorate the reduced capabilities that can go along with aging and disorders.
In order to carry out my research, I use methods such as:
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
multivariate/multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA)
transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the brain
computational modeling (quantitative mixture modeling)
behavioral measures of response time and accuracy
eyetracking
