Honoring Dr. Denise C. Park, the Aging, Neuropsychology, & Cognition journal invites manuscripts building on her work. Send your 200-word abstract and cover letter to Dr. Ian McDonough: [email protected] by Aug 31. Decisions on invitations for full submissions will be made by Sep 30.

Online Now: Toward embodied, ecological cognition with ambulatory virtual reality

Excited to announce our new paper in Trends in Cognitive Science (TICS) on the importance of naturalistic body movements and mobile immersive virtual reality to the study of cognition! Check it out! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We are deeply saddened to share that Dr. Denise C. Park, founder of CVL, passed away on Sunday, Feb 1. A pioneering cognitive neuroscientist, mentor, & leader, Dr. Park shaped the study of memory, aging, & the brain. Read the full remembrance here: cvl.utdallas.edu/in-memory-of-dr-denise-c-park/

Impressive MEGA-analysis: Vulnerability to memory decline in aging revealed by a mega-analysis of structural brain change www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Headed to SfN? My group will be presenting new work on aging, memory, and immersive VR, including early Alzheimer’s markers, aphantasia, and a new VR tool for spatial behavior. Come check us out.

Update: our latest paper is now available with open access: doi.org/10.1162/IMAG... Hou and colleagues reveal the unique role of both the hippocampus and angular gyrus in supporting high fidelity episodic memories!

Understanding behavior requires datasets that capture humans while carrying out complex tasks. The kitchen is an excellent environment for assessing human motor and cognitive function, as many complex actions are naturally exhibited in kitchens from chopping to 🧽! arxiv.org/abs/2506.01608

New paper alert! 🚨 We show that age-related neural dedifferentiation in scene-selective cortex is tied to changes in eye movements. Using simultaneous fMRI + eye-tracking, we found that younger adults’ fixations covary with scene specificity, but this link weakens with age. Link in post below 👇

1/ 🚨 New preprint! 🚨 Excited and proud (& a little nervous 😅) to share our latest work on the importance of #theta-timescale spiking during #locomotion in #learning. If you care about how organisms learn, buckle up. 🧵👇 📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 💻 code + data 🔗 below 🤩 #neuroskyence

Out of 800+ studies on blood-based biomarkers for Alzheimer's, not a single one measured actual changes in patient outcomes. doi.org/10.1136/bmj-...

Delighted to share our latest review in Nature Reviews Neuroscience! We examine the growing evidence that vascular dysfunction plays a key role in cognitive decline in ageing and dementia, and argue that preserving/restoring CBF should be central to future therapies. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨 New paper in Journal of Vision! We show that scene affordances—what you can do in a space—shape how we perceive and categorize scenes. This shapes your similarity preferences, predicts your categorization false alarms, and even alters neural representations. 🧵👇 🔗 doi.org/10.1167/jov.... (1/7)

JNeurosci’s Early career researcher (ECR) Advisory Board just opened a call for applications (due July 18 at 5pm ET). Join our team for a unique opportunity to serve the ECR community and advocate for ECR needs in scientific publishing: www.jneurosci.org/content/ecr-... @sfnjournals.bsky.social

New Paper Alert! de Chastelaine et al found that young adults are able to employ 'retrieval gating' to allow mnemonic content to be aligned with a retrieval goal, but older adults failed to do this even when their memory was boosted to match young adults! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Representation of locomotive action affordances in human behavior, brains, and deep neural networks www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10....

In a recent review, @adekstreme.bsky.social and I revisit how spatial navigation breaks down in aging and early Alzheimer’s disease - and why it’s not just about the brain. doi.org/10.1016/j.co... #SpatialNavigation #AgingBrain #EmbodiedCognition #AlzheimerResearch

Please share; My lab at @psychologyuea.bsky.social @uniofeastanglia.bsky.social is recruiting a post-doc for a cognitive neuroscience memory project. It is a 3-year post, with a proposed start date of 8th September. Application deadline is 15th of June. vacancies.uea.ac.uk/vacancies/15...

It is important now more than ever for scientists to share their work with the general public. I am pleased to have contributed to investNScience’s campaign which they are currently running across numerous social media platforms. It is a great initiative that makes science more relevant to everyone.

Are you attending #CNS2025 ? If so, then you should stop by my poster on Tuesday morning for a fun chat about fmri and spatial memory!!

First post and first paper of the year! We show that semantic memory space becomes denser with age. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... .

The relationship between neural differentiation and exploratory eye movements in healthy young and older adults https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.30.635806v1

Instead of listing my publications, as the year draws to an end, I want to shine the spotlight on the commonplace assumption that productivity must always increase. Good research is disruptive and thinking time is central to high quality scholarship and necessary for disruptive research.

In a new preprint, we show that age differences in navigation strategies are complex & not well explained by the traditional allocentric-egocentric dichotomy. One unexpected finding - young adults shifted towards more 'egocentric' strategies when navigating in immersive and ambulatory VR environment

🚨New paper alert!🚨 -- Registered report style! A "blue-print"! Some people seem born to explore: breaking new ground, traveling to new places. Others seem perfectly content to enjoy familiar comforts. This explore/exploit tradeoff is well-known, and varies across people and situations (1/6)

"Rethinking category-selectivity in human visual cortex" with @susanwardle.bsky.social Maryam Vaziri-Pashkam, Dwight Kravitz @cibaker.bsky.social 1/3

An international study led by a University of Queensland researcher has found #frailty increases a person’s risk of #dementia, but early intervention may be the key to prevention. (JAMA paper at jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...) www.uq.edu.au/news/article... #Alzheimers #publichealth #geriatrics

In a recent preprint, we reviewed the many parallels between gait abnormalities and impaired spatial navigation in older age and Alzheimer's disease. Navigation may offer an ecologically valid cognitive-motor phenotype of age-related cognitive dysfunction. Feedback welcome! osf.io/preprints/os...

Our paper finally appeared on modelling the effect of age on the BOLD fMRI response, one implication of which is that many age effects previously reported may be vascular rather than neural… onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Cognitive reserve against #Alzheimers pathology is linked to brain activity during memory formation www.nature.com/articles/s41... #dementia #neuroscience #science

Gaze reinstatement & neural reactivation may be linked through a common process that reinstates past experiences during memory retrieval! doi.org/10.1101/2024... Check out our #Preprint that integrates eye tracking into the Sherlock fMRI Dataset! Postdoc work w/ @cibaker.bsky.social 🧠🟦 #PsychSciSky

Russellville, AR

I wrote a j-club commentary on a recent article published in #Jneurosci by @neurosteel.bsky.social et al. I discuss the phenomenon of retrieval-related 'anterior shift' and I highlight the implications that this work has on studies examining neural reinstatement. www.jneurosci.org/content/44/1...

New paper in #Jneurosci !⭐ doi.org/10.1523/JNEU... Prior work suggests that age-related reductions in neural selectivity are restricted to the scene-responsive cortex. We show that age effects for other visual categories are observed when selectivity is measured at the level of individual stimuli.