An aging question

By Owen Covington

Professor of Psychology Amy Overman recalls advice from a former dean that when it comes to seeking funding for important research, one should “keep knocking at the door, and eventually they let you in.”

For Overman that door opened in 2016. That’s when the National Institutes of Health signed off on a $350,000, three-year grant to fund her work to delve deeper into age-related changes in memory. Since then, Overman has made significant headway into determining how the presentation of information might impact the ability of a person to remember that information as their overall memory declines. The topic and the work of her lab in the Department of Psychology is getting noticed by other researchers and will likely spur new strategies for helping those with declining memories to better retain important information. 

Overman’s work and her initial grant—the first from the organization for an Elon researcher—is also continuing to open doors. She is working with a colleague from Penn State University to apply for a new NIH grant and will seek an extension of her current grant once it concludes in a little less than a year. “Having secured this grant opens the doors for people who come after me at Elon,” Overman says.

That’s good news for the broader goal of better understanding what drives declines in memory as people age or as their brains are ravaged by Alzheimer’s Disease or other cognitive impairments. Memory and aging have always been a research focus for Overman, who joined the Elon faculty in 2007. At Elon she’s been supported by a variety of university funding opportunities that helped her advance her research and collect the data that would eventually lay the groundwork for her successful NIH grant application. “With that foundation of data, I could demonstrate that this idea I had about how the brain was processing memory had some merit, and I could build a case that way,” Overman says. “I have always involved undergraduates in my research, and I was able to bring them into the fold and get them excited about those ideas as well.”

The idea that Overman has been exploring is whether the brain processes information differently based upon the way it’s presented and if so, if we can tap into those differences to help people remember those discrete pieces of information, such as when to take a prescription or the date of a doctor’s appointment. “The whole basis of this is to better understand how memory is being processed in the brain so that eventually we can develop strategies for people who have memory impairment,” Overman says. She offers an automotive comparison: If you have a car that’s not running right, you need to first understand how a car works before popping the hood and changing out parts. That means better understanding how the brain creates memories, particularly associative memories in which a person forms links between pieces of information. Much of that work to form associative memories falls to the brain’s hippocampus, which unfortunately becomes less able to bind or link memories together as a person grows older. 

However, Overman notes that the perirhinal cortex, which is located close to the hippocampus, stays more intact through the years and continues to process new memories well. That said, the perirhinal cortex is most adept at forming item-to-item associations rather than item-to-context associations. Overman has sought to explore whether changing the way information is presented could help the brain process the memory with the perirhinal cortex, which continues to perform well into old age, rather than the hippocampus, which decreases in size as a person ages, making new associations harder to form. “We want the brain to start using the perirhinal cortex to help,” Overman says. “Our idea was how can we get the brain to process context like it’s an item.”

The extent and depth of Overman’s research has been made possible through the support of the NIH grant, which is designed to advance the research while also enhancing the entire research environment. She is working with seven undergraduate students in her lab, and they’ve been focused on collecting data by testing the memory of young and old subjects based upon whether the information is presented as two items, or an item against a certain context. That data collection in Overman’s lab has been supplemented during the summers by work in the Cognitive Aging and Neuroimaging Lab at Penn State University run by Nancy Dennis, associate professor of psychology and co-investigator on Overman’s NIH-funded project. There, the same memory tests are conducted and functional magnetic resonance images of the brain are created that allow the researchers to know whether it is the hippocampus or perirhinal cortex at work as the memory is being formed. 

Student researchers have been able to tap into additional opportunities thanks to the NIH funding, such as attending professional and research conferences. “I’ve been able to take the students who work with me to these conferences where they were able to meet and talk to the people they’re citing in their research,” Overman says. “I try to build a real community in my lab. I think they are really proud of the work they’re doing. I catch them talking to others and identifying themselves as NIH-funded researchers.” 

This spring three of Overman’s mentees—Alexandra Giglio ’18, Joanna Salerno ’18 and Kayla McGraw ’19—also presented their findings from the research at Elon’s Spring Undergraduate Research Forum. Thanks to Overman’s perseverance (it took three applications for NIH funding before she landed the grant), there could be more students touting themselves as “NIH-funded researchers” in the future. Securing the first NIH grant often raises the visibility of an institution and gives more weight to future grant applications. In the meantime, it’s provided a significant boost to the caliber of research that can be conducted at Elon. “Because this grant is meant to enhance the entire research environment, it really is raising all boats and allowing us to do better research,” Overman says. “This has opened up so many opportunities for future research for me, my students and others.”