Members of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Aging Laboratory traveled to Atlanta for premier scientific meeting in the field.
Amy Overman, associate professor in the Psychology Department and Neuroscience Program and associate director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, was accompanied by several students of Elon College, the College of Arts & Sciences at the recent Cognitive Aging Conference, which was held from May 3-6, 2018, at the JW Marriott Buckhead in Atlanta.
Overman’s mentored research students Kayla McGraw ’19, Andrew Rowley ’19, Joanna Salerno ’18 and Alexandra Giglio ’18 co-authored a poster with Overman titled “Neural encoding differences in older adults’ associative memory,” which was also co-authored by collaborators Courtney Gray and Nancy Dennis of Penn State University. The presentation reported preliminary fMRI data collected by the students as part of Overman’s NIH-funded research into the effects of aging on memory processing functions of specific areas within the medial temporal lobe (MTL) of the brain.
The biennial Cognitive Aging Conference is an international scientific meeting hosted by the Georgia Institute of Technology, and is “the premier conference for presentation of research about aging and cognition based on experimental cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience of aging, human factors and ergonomics, and longitudinal studies of age-related cognitive change, its correlates, and determinants.”
As principal investigator of Elon’s Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Aging (CNMA) Laboratory, Overman mentors multiple undergraduate students carrying out cutting-edge scientific research. Other current CNMA students who attended the conference included Elon College Fellows Laura Bernstein ’19, Elana Kaplan ’19, and Emma Siritzky ’20, as well as Chloe Hultman ’20 and Brandi Williams ’18. Also in attendance were CNMA Lab alumnae Mary Bernhardt ’17 and Ursula Saelzler ’13, both of whom are current Ph.D. students at Georgia Tech. Saelzler was the graduate student responsible for coordinating all of the logistics and organization for this year’s conference.