Behavioral Research and Assessment in Neuropsychology (BRAIN) lab

By Director Julie Suhr

Welcome to the Behavioral Research and Assessment in Neuropsychology Laboratory! We are involved in a lot of exciting projects in the world of neuropsychology.
   
We continue our longstanding projects that involve free dementia screening for local community members. Recent master's and dissertation projects have included the physical, psychological, and cognitive consequences of caregiver burden, the relationship between sleep and cognitive performance, and how cognition impacts driving performance. As part of this larger project, we have also branched out our assessment research into intervention work, by incorporating a psychoeducation intervention on cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I).
   
We also have an aging/dementia project underway as part of a collaboration with the Ohio Musculoskeletal and Neurological Institute (OMNI) lab at the medical school. Our collaboration primarily focuses on walking-related motor impairments, which incorporates clinical gait measures, neuropsychological, neuroimaging, and genetic (ApoE) data collection. We have also incorporated transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) as a part of this project to influence working memory performance.
   
We are also continuing to focus on executive function and frontal lobe-related disorders, including substance misuse and abuse, mild head injury, ADHD, personality traits such as schizotypy, and transdiagnostic factors such as emotion and self-regulation impairments.
   
Finally, we are continuing our longstanding projects in the area of detection of noncredible performance (via both self-report and neurobehavioral measures). In addition, we are continuing to conduct studies that address issues related to patient identity and negative expectations and their impact on individual's self-reported symptoms as well as their behavioral performance in evaluative situations.