Ashley S. Bangert, Ph.D. - Principal Investigator My research falls within the realm of human cognitive psychology, with special interests in understanding the mechanisms of attentional control and timing. I am also interested in how various cognitive processes change with age. Timing is critical for predicting and ordering events and plays an important role in many motor and cognitive behaviors. Moreover, attention is known to influence temporal processes--the ability to selectively attend to and maintain focus on the relevant features of a stimulus allows for accurate encoding of duration representations. However, attentional control is subject to dynamic fluctuations throughout the course of a task and is thought to decline with age and in the face of certain pathological conditions. Therefore, I focus on three major research goals: 1) examining the mechanisms that guide timing behaviors and clarifying how they interact with attention to support other processes, such as motor coordination and event perception; 2) exploring the impact of aging and age-related diseases on these and other cognitive processes (i.e. memory) and identifying methods to mitigate these impacts to bolster learning and performance; and 3) exploring behavioral methodologies, such as the patterns in continuous performance data to investigate how the dynamics of these relationships unfold over time.