Our team aims to understand attention as a core element of human cognition by bridging ideas and perspectives across cognitive, clinical, computational, and developmental neuroscience. Attention is essential for nearly every aspect of our day-to-day experiences, allowing us to focus on the information we need to achieve our goals amid constant distractions. When goal-directed attention is disrupted, whether in momentary lapses or pervasively in the context of mental illness, there are often downstream consequences for higher-order cognitive and affective functions. Importantly, functional brain systems that support goal-directed attention develop gradually throughout childhood and adolescence, allowing attention to develop flexibly and adaptively to environmental demands but also rendering attention systems particularly vulnerable to adverse experiences and social inequities.
Our collaborative team investigates intra- and inter-individual differences in attention in healthy individuals as well as those experiencing mental illness (e.g., depression or anxiety) and explores how cognitive neurodevelopment is shaped by the characteristics of one’s environment and experiences. To address these applied cognitive neuroscience questions, the ACORN laboratory leverages personalized neuroscience methods with a variety of human neuroimaging tools (e.g., fMRI and EEG), behavioral assessments, and statistical modeling approaches across datasets.
Our Questions
Some of our current projects investigate questions like:
- How do our brains focus on what’s important while ignoring distractions?
- How do our environments during childhood and adolescence shape neurodevelopment?
- How do functional brain networks reorganize during development to support the maturation of cognition?
- How might attention change in the context of mental illnesses like depression or anxiety?
- What are the relationships between cognitive and affective symptoms of mental illness?
- What makes the functional organization of your brain unique?
- Do key findings in psychology and neuroscience studies replicate, and can we improve scientific reproducibility?
Our Studies
The Mapping Attention, Psychopathology, and Lived Experience (MAPLE) Study aims to investigate individual differences in attention in the context of anxiety and depression.
This study will leverage innovative advances in personalized neuroscience to capture individual differences across subtypes of attention and progress our understanding of attention in mental disorders. Participants with mood/anxiety symptoms and difficulties in attention will complete self-report questionnaires and undergo functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while performing behavioral tasks.
In our personalized neuroscience approach, we will use behavioral tasks to assess attention, apply precision brain mapping to fMRI data to examine individual differences in brain network organization, and measure participant’s adverse childhood experiences.