Members of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Aging Laboratory attended and presented research at prestigious scientific meetings in Atlanta and San Francisco this Spring.
Amy Overman, professor in the Psychology Department and Neuroscience Program, and assistant dean of Elon College, the College of Arts and Sciences, and her mentored undergraduate research students participated in two important scientific conferences during Spring 2022.
Members of Overman’s research laboratory, the Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Aging (CNMA) Lab this Spring included Olivia DiGiovanni ’24 (Odyssey Scholar), Lindy Feintuch ’24 (Lumen Scholar, Honors Fellow), Brandon Fowlin ’24 (Odyssey Scholar), Paige Goldberg ’24, Pierce Johnson ’22 (Elon College Fellow, Rawls Scholar, Provost’s Fellow), Alejandro Mejia ’24 (Odyssey Scholar), Ryan Monkman ’22 (Watts Scholar), Demaya Starkes ’23, and Madison Tarkenton ’23 (Elon Engagement Scholar).
All nine CNMA students attended the biennial Cognitive Aging Conference, which was held in Atlanta, GA, from April 7-10, 2022. Pierce Johnson ’22 presented a poster titled “Change detection and impression updating in associative memory for face-adjective pairs” (co-authored by Overman and collaborators Joseph Stephens of NC A&T State University and Chris Wahlheim of UNC Greensboro).
Four CNMA students (Johnson, Monkman, Starkes, and Tarkenton) also attended the Cognitive Neuroscience Society annual meeting which was held in San Francisco, CA from April 23-26, 2022. Ryan Monkman ’22 presented a poster titled “Neural distinctiveness and reinstatement in a unitization-promoting paradigm” (co-authored by Overman and collaborators Nancy Dennis, Catherine Carpenter, Sarah Ricupero, and Ashley Steinkrauss of Penn State University), and Madison Tarkenton ’23 presented a poster titled “Examining age differences in
specificity and integration of neural representations for initial and modified associations” (co-authored with Overman, Monkman, Starkes, and DiGiovanni, and Joseph Stephens, Chris Rogers, Lyric Thompson, and Avery-Woods-Gresham of NC A&T State University).
Both conferences are the premier scientific meetings worldwide in their respective areas of focus, and Overman’s students enjoyed networking with other leading scientists and their students, federal program officers, and CNMA lab alumni such as Dr. Ursula Saelzler ’13, who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and Jordyn Cowan ’21, who is currently a research assistant at Brandeis University.
Overman’s research is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Her students, who come from diverse backgrounds, are also supported by a variety of prestigious scholarship and fellowship programs at Elon. More than 85% of Overman’s previous mentored research students have gone on to graduate programs and/or jobs in neuroscience, psychology, and other health science-related fields, and she has published on strategies for undergraduate research mentoring.