Cogntion and action, with an emphasis on how people select actions, learn skills, and produce coordinated movements.
Primary Research Area: Cognitive Neuroscience
Secondary Research Area: Cognition
The CognAc lab explores various aspects of human performance with a focus on how people select, plan, and produce movement. We use a variety of methods, including behavioral studies in healthy and neurologically impaired populations, TMS, fMRI, EEG, ECoG, and computational modeling.
Our current work on skill acquisition focuses on the interaction of explicit and implicit learning mechanisms. In particular, moving in a novel environment (e.g., playing frisbee on a windy day) the motor system is automatically recalibrated, a process that occurs in an incremental manner. We can, though, use strategies to speed up the learning process. We are interested in how these different methods of learning interact. This work builds on the literature examining the relatioship of the cerebellum, parietal lobe, and prefrontal cortex in motor learning.
A second major theme of our work seeks to understand how subcortical structures support cognition. In particular, we are interested in how the cerebellum supports cognition. Anatomical, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging evidence has shown that the functional domain of the cerebellum is not limited to sensorimotor control and learning, but includes many aspects of higher-level cognition such as attention, language, and even social cognition. We use fMRI and behavioral methods to test functional hypotheses, with a focus on whether the cerebellum implements similar computational principles across these different task domains.
Complete List of Published Work:
