Neuropsychology lab

@ Georgia Tech

Dan T. Smith has published an article in the Journal of Neuropsychology. It examines ‘Inhibition of Return’, an effect where people are slower to notice a target if it occurs at a location that was cued quite a while ago. Some have suggested that this effect is due to eye movement inhibition, however Dan found this effect in a woman who has never moved her eyes (as she never developed eye muscles, though her brain is completely normal). This suggests that an ability to move eyes is not required to learn this effect. Dan completed this work as a graduate student in our lab.

Ben Davis has published an article in the Journal of Neuroscience. This work identifies the brain regions that are active when we try to discriminate the temporal order of two visual events (did the red or green item appear first). This work helps understand the profound sequencing problems often experienced after brain injury. Ben completed this work as a graduate student in our lab.

David V Smith has published an article in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. This work finds that similar regions of the brain are activated when we try to listen to peripheral information as when we try to attend to visual information out of the corner of our eye. This work was based on David’s undergraduate summer internship in our lab.

Bianca de Haan has published a new article in the free access journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Similarity Grouping and Repetition Blindness are Both Influenced by Attention. Some previous studies have suggested that people are worse at identifying two items when they are identical (“Repetition Blindness”), whereas others report that people are better when the items are more similar (“Similarity Grouping”). Bianca’s work shows that both effects can be found in the same session with healthy individuals. Her work provides a new paradigm to unravel some of the apparent paradoxes that occur following brain injury. This work is based on data Bianca collected while a PhD student in the lab.

Styrmir Saevarsson’s work in Neuropsychological Rehabilitation shows how neck vibration and prism adaptation therapies can be combined to help treat individuals with spatial neglect. This work has clear implications for the treatment of this common neurological syndrome. Styrmir conducted this work as part of his PhD, prior to joining our team.

Kathleen Pirog Revill has published a paper in PNAS where she taught people words in an invented language (for example “biduko goki” meant ‘horizontal oscillation’ or “dukoba kitu” for ’speckling’). After training, hearing motion words caused more activity in the visual motion areas of the brain than hearing words that did not refer to motion. This finding demonstrates how the perceptual areas of our brain can help with language. Kate conducted this work as part of her PhD, prior to joining our team.