Timing and Attentional Control
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Timing is crucial for many motor and cognitive behaviors. For example, deciding whether you have enough time to cross through an intersection once you see a yellow stoplight requires engagement of temporal processes to initiate and coordinate your actions. Temporal processes are also critical for detecting causality and ordering events. Attention is integral to timing--the ability to selectively maintain focus on the relevant features of a stimulus allows for accurate encoding of duration representations. However, attentional control declines with age and is subject to dynamic fluctuations throughout the course of a task. One line of research in our lab focuses on understanding the basic mechanisms that guide timing behaviors and elucidating how they interact with attention to support other processes, such as motor coordination and event perception. Within this domain we also explore how timing may be used as a tool to influence or track changes in attention, including how simple rhythmic signals can drive increases in attention at critical moments.
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Cognitive Aging
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Our lab explores the impact of normal and pathological aging on attention, cognition, and action. We also investigate the impact of individual differences on trajectories of aging and work to develop methods to minimize age-related declines. One current project investigates how use of embodied encoding techniques, such as gesturing while learning, impacts older adults’ memory.
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