Each year, our faculty, staff, and trainees at Jefferson Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute attend scientific conferences nationally and internationally to present new findings from the Institute’s research studies. This year, we were pleased to have members of multiple research laboratories as authors on posters and presentations shared at the Annual Convention of the Association for Psychological Science (APS). The meeting was held in Washington, D.C., from May 22-25th, and it brought together thousands of scientists, academics, clinicians, researchers, educators, administrators, and students from around the world. We were excited to have our Institute faculty Laurel Buxbaum, PsyD, and Erica Middleton, PhD, as well as postdoctoral fellows Anna Krason, PhD, Amy Lebkuecher, PhD, and Yingxue Tian, PhD, in attendance this year.
Institute Researchers Shared Their Work at the Association for Psychological Science’s Annual Convention
Invited Symposium Presentation: How to Make a Cup of Coffee: Cognitive and Neuroanatomic Substrates of Everyday Actions
Dr. Buxbaum was invited to present in a symposium titled Neural Mechanisms of Perception, Language, and Action in the Real World. Her presentation described her lab’s research on the role of tool-use knowledge, attention, and cognitive control for preventing errors in real-world actions. She also discussed the importance of a left-hemisphere network of brain regions in this performance. This work, conducted with Simon Thibault (Institute Post-Doctoral Fellow) and Aaron Wong (Institute Faculty), was recently published in the journal Cortex.
Submitted Talk and Poster Presentation: Retrieval Practice and Errorless Learning in Naming: Evidence from Aphasia
An abstract authored by Drs. Tian and Middleton, as well as their co-authors Marja-Liisa Mailend, PhD (Institute Faculty), and Daniel Mirman, PhD (faculty at The University of Edinburgh), was presented during one of the poster sessions, and it was also selected as an oral presentation. Dr. Tian did an excellent job delivering the oral presentation, and she was joined by Dr. Middleton at the poster presentation to share their work with attendees. The research presented focused on the retrieval practice effect in which retrieval practice results in greater success than mere exposure. The team investigated person-specific and item-specific factors that interact with the magnitude of the retrieval practice effect, and this revealed effects of working memory at the person level as effects of error type at the item level.
Poster Presentation: Disentangling the Role of Cognitive Control in Conflict and Competition during Sentence and Word Comprehension in Individuals with Aphasia
During one of the Convention’s poster sessions, Dr. Krason shared results from a collaborative research project, which was co-authored by Dr. Middleton, Matthew Ambrogi (Institute research assistant), and Malathi Thothathiri, PhD (faculty at The George Washington University). Skylar Kalechstein (undergraduate student at The George Washington University) contributed to the project and was a co-presenter. Their study investigated whether upregulating cognitive control—the mental ability to detect and resolve conflicts—enhances comprehension in people with aphasia. Specifically, they examined how cognitive control modulates conflict versus competition at the levels of comprehending words vs sentences. Findings from this work can advance language-cognition models and inform novel aphasia interventions.
Poster Presentation: Using EEG to Examine Action Semantics in Primary Progressive Aphasia and Parkinson’s Disease
Dr. Lebkuecher presented findings from new research which was conducted with her mentor Dr. Buxbaum, as well as co-authors Chia-Lin Lee (faculty at National Taiwan University), Kristen Li (research assistant at University of Pennsylvania), and H. Branch Coslett, MD (faculty at University of Pennsylvania). The preliminary data presented was from an ongoing project using EEG to examine whether meaningful hand gestures facilitate language comprehension in individuals with Primary Progressive Aphasia and Parkinson’s Disease. This project is also investigating if disease-related disruption of sensorimotor brain regions contributes to reduced facilitation of language comprehension from gestures.
These presentations at the APS Annual Convention provided excellent opportunities for Institute faculty and postdoctoral fellows to connect with colleagues spanning a variety of disciplines in the psychological sciences and to promote the outstanding research being done in cognitive neuroscience at our Institute.