Psychology Graduate Student Success at Biomedical Graduate Research Day!

Chelsea Stillman

Chelsea Stillman (mentor: Howard) won first place for her poster called “Caudate Resting State Connectivity Predicts Implicit Sequence Learning Performance: A Replication and Extension”, which built upon findings from an earlier study. Consistent with results of our earlier work, we again found that better learning was associated with stronger intrinsic communication, or resting state functional connectivity, between the caudate and medial temporal lobe. The results of the new study are consistent with our hypothesis that stronger communication between these regions helps to promote a “readiness to learn”, perhaps by enabling these two regions to interact more efficiently during learning. 

Charles Lynch

Charles Lynch (mentor: Vaidya) won second place for an oral presentation titled “Context dependent functional connectivity of the temporoparietal junction during attentional control.” This work examined how a brain system important for attentional control (i.e., our ability to control where and what we pay attention to) reconfigures when transitioning between task states with different attentional demands. We found that flexibility of this brain system was highly predictive of individual differences in trait-level attentional control.