Daniel Tranel Ph.D.
daniel-tranelatuiowadotedu
Professor of Neurology; Psychology; Neuroscience Ph.D. Program Director

My research is aimed at understanding brain-behavior relationships in humans, at systems level. Two main approaches are used:

(1) the lesion method, in which brain-damaged patients are studied with neuropsychological procedures to determine how certain lesion sites are related to certain cognitive and behavioral deficits; and

(2) functional imaging, including PET and fMRI, in which the brain activation in normal subjects is measured while the subjects are performing various tasks. Specific topics that I am working on currently include: retrieval of conceptual knowledge; retrieval of words and lexical knowledge; emotion and decision-making; face processing; nonconscious processing; acquired disorders of social conduct; memory; psychophysiology. My research has been continuously and fully funded for two decades. I have about a thousand square feet of laboratory space in the Department of Neurology in the University of Iowa Hospitals.

Selected Publications

Tranel, D., Hathaway-Nepple, J., & Anderson, S.W. Impaired behavior on real-world tasks following damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, (in press)

Vianna, E.P.M., & Tranel, D. Gastric myoelectrical activity as an index of emotional arousal. International Journal of Psychophysiology, (in press)

Griffin, S.L., & Tranel, D. Age of onset, functional reorganization, and neuropsychological outcome in temporal lobectomy. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, (in press)

Tranel, D., Gullickson, G., Koch, M., & Adolphs, R. Altered experience of emotion following bilateral amygdala damage. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, (in press)

Tranel, D. (2006). Impaired naming of unique landmarks is associated with left temporal polar damage. Neuropsychology, 20, 1-10.

Tranel, D., & Jones, R.D. (2006). Knowing what and knowing when. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 28, 43-66.

Duff, M.C., Hengst, J., Tranel, D., & Cohen, N.J. (2006). Development of shared information in communication despite hippocampal amnesia. Nature Neuroscience, 9, 140-146.

Hsu, M., Bhatt, M., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., & Camerer, C.F. (2005). Neural systems responding to degrees of uncertainty in human decision-making. Science, 310, 1680-1683.

Tranel, D., Damasio, H., Denburg, N.L., & Bechara, A. (2005). Does gender play a role in functional asymmetry of ventromedial prefrontal cortex? Brain, 128, 2872-2881.

Tranel, D., Grabowski, T.J., Lyon, J., & Damasio, H. (2005). Naming the same entities from visual or from auditory stimulation engages similar regions of left inferotemporal cortices. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17, 1293-1305.