Resources
Our lab at the University of Delaware has the following resources:
- Cognitive neuropsychology
- A large (600+) database of brain-damaged individuals who have expressed interest in participating in research.
- Software and training in using voxel-lesion symptom mapping (VLSM) to understand structure-function relations in the brain.
- A number of participants willing to be tested in single-case studies.
- Cognitive neuroscience
- A new 3T Siemens Prisma scanner at the CBBI at the University of Delaware.
- Access to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).
- Cognitive psychology
- Access to a large (1000+ per semester) pool of undergraduate students for cognitive testing.
- Screened individuals with mirror-touch synesthesia, grapheme-color synesthesia, and other interesting phenomena.
- Software for experimental presentation and statistical analysis (E-Prime, MATLAB, Psychtoolbox, SPSS, etc.)
Current Projects
Below is a list of just a few of the projects we are currently working on in the Cognitive Neuropsychology lab. If you are a prospective graduate student, and these sound like interesting topics to you – do not hesitate to contact us! We are happy to talk about our research, and what you could do at the University of Delaware. Our research is supported by several funding sources, including a major NSF grant examining the relationship between cognition and perception.
Surprisingly, individuals with damage to somatosensory cortex after stroke can often still feel touch. Little is known regarding how this occurs, and cortical plasticity after stroke. We are currently using multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) and representational similarity analysis (RSA) to examine reorganization after stroke.
We are currently presenting a battery of tests examining deficits in body representation in brain-damaged individuals. These tests examine abilities ranging from simple tactile detection to screeners for rare disorders (including alien hand syndrome, supernumerary limb, anosognosia, etc.) We are using these data for additional single-case research and future neuroimaging studies.
Several projects in our lab are focused on multisensory integration and the body. In particular, we are using novel variants of the mirror box illusion to understand embodiment, touch, and the relationship between these projects. Ongoing projects are using the rubber hand and Pinocchio illusions to address similar questions.
We have been actively recruiting individuals with mirror-touch synesthesia – individuals who feel touch on their own bodies when seeing someone else being touched. We are currently using this population to understand the mechanisms that give rise to mirror-touch phenomena, along with other experiments to examine how visual information influences tactile processing more broadly.