Projects

We do so many different projects in this lab! We used to focus a lot on treatment of progressive language disorders in PPA. During recent years we have been developing tools for detecting semantic impairment in discourse. We are also doing a lot of work on involuntary cursing in brain injury. We use a variety of tools for yoking behavior to physiology, including: pupillometry, eyetracking, tDCS, EEG, fMRI. These are all just tools though to get at what we really care about — the neurobiology of language.

1: Longitudinal analysis of underrepresented minority cognitive aging

We are following a cohort of older African American adults from Philadelphia over the span of five years. We are collecting numerous behavioral and eyetracking measures to evaluate change in cognition and language in relation to standardized neuropsychological assessments. Disparities in the detection and treatment of dementia in older African American adults are immense. We are working toward developing an improved global assessment of cognitive functioning as an alternative to the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA).

3: your brain on horror: language in hyperarousal

We are interested what happens to language when we are experiencing high levels of physiological arousal. Think about when you are scared out of your mind. How do your sentence structures and word choices change? What better way to manipulate physiological arousal than to hear a scary story! We will be collecting simultaneous heart rate and pupil size measurements as people see horrifying video clips followed by picture descriptions.

4: pupillary response functions in cognitive aging

We’ve done a fair bit of work in measuring dynamics of the human pupil during demanding tasks. One possibility is that abnormal pupillary dynamics may yield a sensitive biomarker of emerging cognitive deficits that mark dementia in aging. This may not sound exciting, but it is to us! We are measuring how pupils react to light and to transitions between words while people hear stories. Our goal is to disseminate norms for pupil responses against which other researchers might benchmark disease states.

5: symbolic knowledge

We have developed a set of animations depicting simple geometric shapes portraying meaningful actions (e.g., a long rectangle bending under the weight of a falling circle = HEAVY). We are evaluating whether people with aphasia can understand the concepts represented by these nonverbal conceptual depictions. We are ultimately interested in assessing symbolic knowledge and the link between words (symbols) and concepts.

7: role of executive functioning in semantic memory

Here’s a paradox — Most models of semantic memory propose a necessary (integral) role of executive functioning. Yet, people with severe EF deficits (e.g., TBI, frontal variant FTD) typically don’t show frank semantic impairments. It’s an enigma! We are investigating whether semantic memory has its own dedicated ‘control’ system dissociable from EF. We are focusing on executive demands incurred during the processing of sounds (words, environmental sounds).

8: concepts without words

The weird feeling you have on a Sunday evening, crust at the top of a ketchup bottle, etc.…..These are concepts that many of us can relate to, but these concepts do not have corresponding labels in English. We are studying the effect(s) that verbal labels have on conceptual processing.

9: Vocal and linguistic biomarkers of cursing

This is a fun one. We are investigating how individual differences in aggression and anger influence behavior during cursing. We are examining vocal factors such as volume and jitter, as well as linguistic factors such as the ‘severity’ of the curse words people choose to produce during a spontaneous generation task (e.g,, cursing verbal fluency).

13: pupillometry methods 101

Although not particularly thrilling, there is a great need to improve and standardize cognitive pupillometry (i.e., measurement of pupil changes in response to cognitive demands). We are exploring several new ways of conducting pupillometry during real time language comprehension and production. We are also evaluating a method for testing equivalence between two conditions and assessing the effects of ocular dominance (e.g., which is the best eye to test?).

14: optimal strategy use during verbal fluency

Name as many animals as you can in one minute…. That’s verbal fluency! We are evaluating optimal strategy use for producing successful verbal fluency in terms of cluster size vs. switch count. This is important because verbal fluency is a bread-and-butter test of executive and semantic functioning.

Cold Case Projects

So many ideas and not enough time… Here are some projects we have either planned to do or would like to eventually do but just haven’t been able to squeeze them in.

1: font optimization for reading in TBI

One of the big problems hindering return to work or school after someone experiences a moderate to severe TBI is visual fatigue. People cannout tolerate reading or looking at screens for very long. We are interested in evaluating how particular features of fonts (e.g., presence or absence of serifs, kerning) modulates cognitive load in people with TBI. This study will involve memory for reading passages presented in different fonts. Our working hypothesis is that 12 point Helvetica is the closest to optimal.