Research at the Development, Experience, and Neurocognition Lab addresses the long-standing question of why some children, often from disadvantaged backgrounds, fall behind their peers in academic achievement while others thrive. We take several major approaches to address this broad question. We...

My research concerns the experimental investigation of cognitive processes in animal behavior, with particular interests in comparing cognition and perception in human and nonhuman animals. Specific research topics include: conceptual behavior, visual pattern recognition, short-term memory, and...

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

In patient with lewy body disease, the protein alpha-synuclein aggregates, leading to severe multi-system symptoms, including hallucinations, loss of smell, dementia, imbalance, fluctuating confusion, and anxiety/depression. The main research goal of the Aldridge Laboratory is to understand the...

Homeostasis is a robust form of regulation that allows a system to maintain a constant output despite external perturbations. In the nervous system, homeostasis plays a critical role in regulating neuronal and synaptic activity. Yet the molecular basis of this form of neural plasticity is generally...

The Psychiatry and Early Neurobiological Development Lab (PENDL) at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine seeks to understand molecular and cellular aspects of early brain development and their relevance to psychiatric disorders. Hanna Stevens, the PI, is particularly interested in...

My research broadly concerns how people recover the meaning of spoken language as it unfolds in real-time, and in particular how they cope with the vast amount of variability in the speech signal. To this end, we use techniques like head-mounted eye-tracking, event-related potentials and inter...

Humans spend about a third of their life sleeping. Yet, our understanding of the cognitive, emotional and neurodevelopmental functions of this essential behavior and how these may be disrupted in clinical populations is still very limited. Sleep disturbances are observed in most major psychiatric...

The Williams Lab is interested in understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms by which genetic risk factors contribute to psychiatric disease from a developmental perspective. Their current projects focus on voltage-gated calcium channel genes, which have been linked to the risk of...

Dr. Inyong Choi studies neural mechanisms of auditory processing, specifically as it applies to how the human brain segregates a target sound from a mixture of interfering sounds, how the ability degrades in hearing-impaired listeners, and how hearing interventions recover such neural processes...

We combine behavioral, physiological, functional neuroanatomical, and cellular approaches to unravel the neural circuitry that underlies adaptive neuroendocrine responses to stress. Recently we have identified a locus in the basal forebrain that serves as a neural hub for integrating and relaying...

Alcoholism, alcohol abuse, and the medical complications of excessive drinking are major world-wide health problems. There are three long-term goals of my laboratory: (1) Alcohol exposure during development results in fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) and induces profound damages to the...