Welcome to the Language and Memory Aging (LaMA) Laboratory at the University of Utah.
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About UsThe Language and Memory Aging (LaMA) lab is housed in the Department of Psychology at the University of Utah. Our research is focused on understanding the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying human language and memory systems across the adult lifespan.
We adopt an interdisciplinary and multi-method approach to this work. We draw on theories and methods in cognitive science, gerontology, neuroscience, linguistics, and quantitative and experimental psychology. We use a combination of techniques, including the study of human brain functioning (e.g., event-related brain potentials, transcranial magnetic stimulation), eye tracking, human performance, and peripheral physiology (e.g., pupillometry, heart-rate variability). |
LocationOur lab is located on the 10th floor of the Behavioral Sciences (Beh S) building at the University of Utah.
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News
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NIDCD grant 11.15. 2021
We are so thrilled to announce that we have received funding for a 3-year grant from the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (PI: Payne, NIDCD R21 Early Career Award Grant). The grant is called "Understanding the effects of listening effort on sentence processing and memory in sensorineural hearing loss: Evidence from simultaneous electrophysiology and pupillometry". We will be using EEG and pupil measurements with behavioral performance to characterize the effects of age related hearing loss on sentence comprehension and verbal memory in older adults. LaMA Lab is back in action! 06.03. 2021 After a year-long shutdown due to COVID-19, the LaMA Lab is back in action! We are starting up a bunch of exciting projects, including studies on the neural basis of false hearing, parafoveal processing of plausibility, effects of anxiety and working memory on error processing, speech interactions with driving performance, using deep learning models to predict syntactic ambiguity effects in reading, and more! We also have had a ton of exciting news for our current and future lab members. Hannah is starting a PhD program at University of Ohio in Psychology and will receive a prestigious NIH T-32 PhD Traineeship. Our newest student, Allyson, was awarded a prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Sara LoTemplio won the B Jack White Award, and Jack won the Clayton Award for Excellence in Research. The lab also has a number of new papers coming out, including papers in press at Cortex and Ear & Hearing, so watch out for those! Best Poster @ Snowbird Neuroscience 11.07.2019 Congrats to Jack and Clara who won first place for the best poster award at the Snowbird Neuroscience Symposium (https://neuroscience.med.utah.edu/snowbird.php) this year for their presentation entitled: “The role of left inferior frontal cortex in memory for predictable and unpredictable words: An event-related rTMS study" Welcome, Clara! 08.08.2019 Clara Lopes is the newest member of the LaMA lab, joining the Cognition and Neural Sciences PhD program in the Fall. Clara comes to us after completing a post- baccalaureate research position with the Applied Cognition Lab and pursuing a masters in Speech Language Pathology at the University of Utah. We are excited for her arrival! New Publications 08.08.2019 Check out the newest and most recent Publications from the LAMA Lab.
NSF-GRFP award to Sara LoTemplio! 04.09.2019 Congrats are in order for Sara LoTemplio, who was awarded a prestigious and competitive NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! Great work, Sara! Upcoming LaMA Lab Presentations 08.18.2018 Keep an eye out for poster and symposium presentations from the LaMA lab at the upcoming annual meetings of the Psychonomic Society, the Society for Psychophysiological Research, and the Academy of Rehabilitative Audiology! Congratulations to Vanessa! 08.07.2018 Congrats to Vanessa Srivastava, an undergraduate honors student in the LaMA lab. She was recently awarded a competitive UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program) award from the Office of Undergraduate Research to support her undergraduate thesis project on text captioning and listening effort in ESL participants. Seed Grant on Neuronavigated Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation 06.11.2018 The LaMA lab was recently awarded a University Research Incentive Seed Grant for the project entitled, "A causal test of neural predictive coding in language comprehension: Insights from simultaneous electrophysiology and navigated transcranial magnetic stimulation." This project will use MRI-navigated speech mapping to study the shared neural circuits underlying speech production and sentence comprehension in healthy adults. This project will utilize the newly developed TMS research facility at the University Neuropsychiatric Institute at the U. Welcome, Jack! 05.31.2018 Jack Silcox is the newest member of the LaMA lab. Jack joins us from Loyola University in Chicago, where he completed a masters degree in Statistics. Jack graduated from BYU in 2016 with a B.S. in Neuroscience. He will be joining the Cognition and Neural Sciences PhD program in the Fall. |