Meet the Researchers involved in the NPD project:

James Danckert

My research interests are primarily in human neuropsychology, and, more specifically, in the effects of right parietal brain lesions on behaviour. Right parietal lesions often lead to the disorder of visuospatial neglect – the inability to attend or respond to stimuli in left visual space. In the past, I have made use of behavioural tasks such as the flanker and covert orienting tasks, intended to assess the extent of cognitive and attentional impairment arising from neglect. In addition, these and other tasks can be used to explore how much implicit processing of neglected stimuli remains intact in these patients. I have also made use of eye movements and limb kinematics to explore the effect that visual neglect has on the control of these crucial actions – actions known to depend, to some extent, on right parietal functioning. Recently, I began making use of a prism adaptation technique developed in France that is designed to rehabilitate neglect. I also intend to make use of functional MRI (fMRI) to explore the processes involved in prism adaptation both in healthy individuals and in patients with neglect. My other research interests include blindsight, the neural correlates of consciousness, frontal lobe injury, motivation and the neural correlates of boredom.

Mike Dixon

One focus of my research has been to understand how we recognize objects, and how brain damage can cause category specific agnosia: a selective recognition impairment for things like fruits and vegetables, with a sparing of recognition for objects like tools and furniture. Although much of this research involved a case study approach, recently I have successfully applied the paradigms I developed with single patients to groups of people suffering from Alzheimer's disease. This recent study outlines the factors that cause recognition problems in Alzheimer's disease, and may point to a means of detecting this disease in its earliest stages . Studying people with problems like category specific agnosia can often provide important clues about how certain fundamental processes like object recognition work in healthy individuals. In addition to object recognition deficits, I have also had the opportunity to investigate prosopagnosia (inability to recognize faces), and colour agnosia (inability to recognize colours).

Myra Fernandes

My research program involves developing an understanding of the cognitive processes, and brain regions, involved in memory and language. I am interested in knowing how we encode new information, how it is organized and represented in the brain, and how we reactivate the information during retrieval. I am particularly interested in how these change as people age. I evaluate the ability of young adults and seniors to carry out a memory task under conditions in which there is another on-going task competing for their attention. The amount and type of interference observed allows one to infer the cognitive resources and components required for the two tasks, and can provide insight into human memory processing. I also use neuroimaging (fMRI) to identify the brain regions and networks (using PLS) mediating memory processing; these are used to determine how the strategy and brain regions contributing to memory change as we age. A related research interest lies in understanding how different types of information (words, numbers, symbols, spatial layouts) are represented and organized in the brain, through the use of behavioural paradigms, fMRI, and neural network models. My other line of research examines the relationship between neuropsychological and neuroimaging methods of evaluation of language localization.

Roxane Itier

My interests are in Cognitive Neuroscience with a focus on Social Cognition and its neural bases. My research investigates the neural networks underlying face processing, in particular the perception and recognition of face identity, facial expressions and gaze direction. I am particularly interested in the central role of eyes, with the hypothesis that there exists a specific brain network dedicated to the detection and processing of eyes in the environment, different from, but interacting with, the neural network subserving face processing. My work also investigates the relationships between gaze processing and theory of mind, the ability to infer and understand the mental states of others such as intentions and desires. I am especially interested in how these cognitive abilities and their underlying brain networks develop over the lifespan, and what role they play in pathologies in which social cognition appears to go awry. Such pathologies include Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASDs), as well as neuropsychological populations such as frontal lobe patients and individuals impaired at face recognition (a disorder called prosopagnosia of “face blindness”). My research program includes behavioral testing, EEG, MEG, fMRI, eye tracking and neuropsychological studies.

Britt Anderson

I am interested in developing mechanistically specific models of cognitive phenomena and submitting those models to experimental examination.

One example of where I think psychology can benefit from modeling is attention. A good case can be made that attention is a Bayesian Decision Process (BDP). One consequence of this is that the prior probability of targets in search tasks should have a predictable relationship to search performance. The NPD helps test these ideas by providing the opportunity to conduct studies on people with and without attentional impairment.  A second project of this type is my collaboration with James Danckert. Togethe, we are working on an account of mental model updating that may explain some of the deficits that people have after strokes, especially parietal lobe strokes. Recent presentations on this work took place at the European Conference for Visual Perception (2010) and the Society for Neuroscience (2010). You can find more details about me and my research at http://psychology.uwaterloo.ca/~britt

William McIlroy

My research focuses on: 1) understanding how the brain and other parts of the central nervous system control movements of the body and 2) translating this knowledge into post-stroke interventions that provide the best possible functional recovery in patients. This includes a focus on techniques that can maximize neurophysiologic change and recovery as well as identifying more effective compensatory strategies / technologies. To meet this objective, my work ranges from basic fundamental research to clinical trials with a primary focus on mobility and balance control.

Eric Roy

My research is aimed at understanding the neurocognitive and neuromotor mechanisms underlying how movements are learned and controlled, by examining normal healthy persons as well as those with neurologic disorders such as stroke, Alzheimer's disease and Down syndrome. Since many of these disorders arise in older adults, I also focus on the effects of aging. Prehension, movement sequencing, limb gesturing and tool use and disruptions to these movements seen in various neurologic disorders are all of interest. One line of research is concerned with identifying the basis of manual asymmetries in performance and how these asymmetries vary with and are related to measures of hand preference. Another focus is on apraxia, a disorder in limb gesturing and tool use. In this work, I developed a cognitive neuropsychological model of apraxia to identify disruptions at different stages of gesture production and then to relate these to lesion localization in the brain. A more applied aspect of my research builds upon my expertise as a clinical neuropsychologist and involves studying the effects of concussion and traumatic brain injury. One focus is on concussion in hockey. I act as a consultant to several teams in the Ontario Hockey (Major Junior A) League in the use of neuropsychological assessments as part of return to play guidelines for players who have suffered a concussion. I am also an advisor to a committee of the Ontario Brain Injury Association on concussion in hockey. I am a co-investigator on a national study of concussion in hockey which is aimed at examining the incidence of concussion, establishing return to play guidelines and developing educational materials on concussion for coaches and players and their families.

Richard Staines

My research interests focus on understanding: 1) how the brain interprets, adapts to and integrates sensory inputs to guide motor behaviour, and 2) how these processes are affected by and can contribute to recovery from brain injury. The long-term objective is to use this knowledge to formulate strategies targeted at enhancing neural adaptations to improve motor behaviour and lessen disability following stroke.
Our ability to produce coordinated movement to interact with our environment is often driven by the analysis of continuous sensory information from multiple sources. While much attention has been directed to the neural control of voluntary movement and visuomotor behaviours, very little is known about how multimodal sensory information is integrated with proprioceptive feedback of limb position in the brain. Yet these interrelationships are critical in understanding the neurophysiology of human motor control. My research program focuses on understanding how the CNS integrates sensory information from multiple input sources and transforms this sensory information to appropriate motor commands.
Understanding of recovery processes following brain injury from stroke is still relatively underdeveloped and there is a pressing need for new innovative approaches to improve rehabilitation in order to promote recovery and lessen disability. My research integrates state-of-the-art neuroimaging and neurophysiological techniques in healthy and brain-injured populations to understand the physiological substrates of recovery from brain injury due to stroke. Specifically, my lab studies mechanisms in the human CNS that are responsible for controlling movement and for adaptations due to learning and injury.
I am a core scientist in the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario’s Centre for Stroke Recovery at Sunnybrook & Women’s College Health Science Centre.

 

Laura Middleton

My research aims to identify ways to optimize cognition across the life course and to prevent dementia in late life. In particular, I focus on the relationship between physical activity, cognition, and brain function using techniques from several disciplines including neuroscience, exercise physiology and epidemiology. I am working to better characterize the short- and long-term cognitive effects of exercise by domain and duration. In addition, I investigate how exercise dose, duration, and type alter the cognitive effects. I am also applying this basic understanding of the relationship between physical activity and cognitive function to develop exercise programs to improve cognition among a variety of groups including people with or at risk for dementia and people who have experienced a stroke as well as healthy populations.

 

 

Nadine Quehl

Nadine is the current Project Coordinator for the NPD, and the person you will see most in the recruitment process. Nadine will connect the principal investigators and their student researchers with the patient participants who have been recruited from Grand River Hospital or Freeport Health Center.

 

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