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Graduate Students

David Fegen MD Email:   Work phone:   510-642-2839 Office:   132 Barker Hall I graduated from Columbia Medical School and began work in the D'Esposito lab in summer of '06. My research involves using fMRI to help elucidate the role of the prefrontal cortex in top-down control processes. Specifically, I plan to use the psychological phenomenon known as “directed forgetting” to study how the prefrontal cortex may influence posterior brain regions. Directed forgetting occurs when we instruct ourselves to let go of certain information after we are done utilizing it, for example after an exam or a speech. Within this framework I intend to gain insight on both the nature and origin of the prefrontal cortex’s inhibitory top-down signal. In a second project, I am looking at how a cholinesterase inhibitor, donepezil, affects the selectivity of visual sensory representations in visual association cortex. The impetus for this work is the general lack of understanding of how these drugs operate at a systems level. So far our findings have revealed that donepezil increases representation selectivity by decreasing the overlap between representations of different object categories and enhancing the overall signal-to-noise ratio.

Amy S Finn Graduate Email:   Work phone:   510-642-2839 Office:   210 Barker Hall I completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin where I did my senior honors thesis in Jenny Saffran’s lab . We investigated child and adult learning differences for different language-based patterns using artificial visual languages presented interactively on touch-screen computers. Before coming to Berkeley, I worked on a research support team or Resource Center at Indiana University School of Medicine. We supported public health research and managed feasibility studies for a large scale National Children’s Study that eventually aims to track over 1,000 children from before birth into adulthood. My research aims to understand whether brain development can explain why children and adults learn differently? During the first 24 years of life, our brains undergo massive developmental changes. My interests involve understanding how these structural and functional changes impact learning in general. Of particular interest is how this might explain an interesting paradox in learning: why do children, who are not as good at learning physics or algebra, achieve native capacity when learning a new language while many adults do not? One explanation involves the protracted development of frontal and temporal lobes. We have begun to explore this with fMRI and are looking to see whether the functional profiles of these areas differ for children, adolescents and adults during general learning and memory related tasks. Another, but related, line of research explores how other domain general aspects of cognition—such as working memory—explain age-related differences in language learning.

Caterina Gratton Email:   Work phone:   510-643-4416 Office:   210N Barker Hall I graduated from the University of Illinois in 2008 with degrees in psychology and neuroscience. As an undergraduate, I worked in Kara Federmeier’s laboratory, studying the organization of and access to category information using ERPs. In addition, I worked summers with Diane Beck and Denise Park where I participated in studies on visual attention and cognitive changes in aging, respectively. I am now working jointly in the D’Esposito and Silver laboratories as a graduate student in the neuroscience program at UC Berkeley. I am broadly interested in understanding how brain areas communicate during top-down processing to manipulate bottom-up input. In particular, I will be exploring the mechanisms by which networks in the brain can alter visual perception, depending on task goals and context. An initial project will use fMRI to investigate the phenomenon of decreased spatial spread of activity in visual cortex with attention. In a second project in the D’Esposito lab, I am collaborating with Emi Nomura and Renee Visser to analyze resting state data from patient and non-patient populations. We hope to use this data to help better characterize the deficits that occur with brain damage and improve our understanding of how different networks in the brain communicate and can reorganize after injury.

Emily C. Jacobs Email:   Work phone:   510.642.2839 Office:   210 Barker Hall Before Berkeley I majored in Neuroscience at Smith College. Using imaging and behavioral measures, I investigated the impact of stereotyping on academic performance, focusing on the psychological pressure that develops when an individual is stereotyped and fears corroborating that stereotype (a phenomenon called stereotype threat). In parallel, I studied cognitive development under the mentorship of Adele Diamond. I spent my last year as a visiting undergraduate scholar at Harvard, where I continued working with Adele to pinpoint critical stages in the development of working memory and symbolic thought in children taking into account developmental changes in the dopamine system. My interests center around how dopamine functions in the prefrontal cortex. The approach I take to answering that question considers a role for estrogen, stress and genetic polymorphisms, which shape dopamine's action in this region. What emerges is fundamentally a very simple question: what makes people differ? How do people differ cognitively, how might they differ in response to stress, and how do they differ in response to drugs (drugs of abuse and pharmacological treatments)? By taking an idiosyncratic approach to healthcare we can better identify those people who are most vulnerable to disorders rooted in dysfunction of frontal lobe and in particular the dopamine system. I use brain imaging (fMRI, PET), pharmacology and cognitive testing along with gene and endocrine measures to tackle those questions.

Taraz Lee Email:   I am broadly interested in how the brain controls the mind (and vice versa). How are our goals, needs, and intentions represented in the brain and how do they modulate other brain processes and actions? These questions lead me toward the study of the function and the organization of the prefrontal cortex and its role in cognitive control. I have recently become interested in studying the interaction between implicit procedural learning (e.g. learning to ride a bike) is influenced by explicit learning and deliberate practice. Before coming to Berkeley, I received a B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University. While there, I worked on a variety of studies in Lee Ross's Social Psychology Lab. After graduation, I returned to Stanford to work in Lera Boroditsky's Cognitive Psychology Lab on various psychophysical studies.

Asako Miyakawa Email:

Shawn Song Email:   Currently a fourth year medical student at UCSF, I am taking two years off in order to pursue a Master's Degree in Clinical Research. Prior to medical school, I attended Williams College where I majored in Biology. My research interests are currently focused on the selection of relevant information into working memory (and the filtering of irrelevant information). Under the mentorship of Dr. D'Esposito and Dr. Anthony Chen, I am exploring the underlying neural mechanisms of this selection process using functional MRI in healthy individuals as well as in patients with a history of brain injury.