Vision & Cognition Laboratory<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Q&A with Alice Cronin-Golomb, PhD<\/h3>\nWhat is your current research focus, and how does it align with the Center for Brain Recovery’s mission?<\/h4>\n
My principal research focus is on perception, cognition, motor function, mood, sleep, and other aspects of daily function in aging and age-related neurodegenerative disease. My main methodology is behavioral and includes cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychological assessment, neuroimaging, and visual psychophysics. A main emphasis of my Vision and Cognition Lab is on the non-motor symptoms of Parkinson\u2019s disease and their interaction with motor symptoms. I also have a long-standing interest in perception and cognition in Alzheimer\u2019s disease and healthy aging and actively collaborate on projects in these areas. Our engagement in basic research and development of interventions to enhance quality of life in persons with compromised brain function aligns very well with CBR\u2019s mission.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
How did you initially become involved and\/or interested in your field?<\/strong><\/h4>\nI was a first-generation college student at Wesleyan University, a biology major on a pre-med track almost by default. I didn\u2019t even know what graduate school was. Then I discovered a course called Brain Mechanisms of Learning and the scales fell from my eyes. This was exactly what I wanted to do. With supportive faculty I figured out how to apply to graduate school and get into this field. I\u2019ve never regretted it!<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
What brought you to Boston University?<\/h4>\n
My postdoc in behavioral neuroscience was at MIT, and my husband had just gotten a faculty position at Tufts, so we were trying to solve the 2-body problem. A faculty position in clinical neuropsychology opened at BU and he dared me to apply for it even though I wasn\u2019t a clinical psychologist (my degree being in Psychobiology at Caltech). Dare accepted. I am a faculty member in two programs within our department, Clinical and Brain, Behavior, and Cognition, and it\u2019s been a wonderful fit for me.<\/p>\n
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What courses do you teach?<\/strong><\/h4>\nI teach undergraduate Neuropsychology (PS\/NE338) and graduate Principles of Neuropsychology (PS829). The courses are taught at different levels and have different requirements but both focus on neuropsychology as the study of the relation of brain and behavior. We cover structure (including anatomy) and function in healthy and disordered brain states.<\/p>\n
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What research are you most proud of?<\/strong><\/h4>\nI\u2019m going to give you two. First was our earlier work on basic vision in Alzheimer\u2019s disease and how it affects cognition. I\u2019m proud of that because sensory deficits often are fixable, whereas cognitive problems often are not. If one reason you seem to have cognitive problems (e.g., memory loss) is because you didn\u2019t encode information properly because of visual or hearing deficits, then your \u201cmemory\u201d problem might actually be reduced if you clean up your sensory function. That\u2019s really important! Second, we have done a lot of work on the non-motor symptoms of Parkinson\u2019s disease (PD) (for example, cognition, depression, anxiety, sleep disruption, autonomic dysfunction), which is something that many people don\u2019t think about because they are so focused on the motor symptoms, but these non-motor symptoms are very distressing. Early on, we demonstrated a clear and specific deficit in visuospatial dysfunction in PD, before anyone else had, and more recently we have focused on psychological interventions for non-motor symptoms, including cognitive-behavioral therapy. People with PD tell us how important treating these symptoms is to them so I\u2019m proud of that too, and proud of my students for coming up with these treatments.<\/p>\n
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