Growing up in Aging Neuroscience a Mini-Symposium for Current and Future Aging Neuroscientists March 13, 2020 | Brown University

Growing Up in Aging Neuroscience A mini-symposium for current and future aging neuroscientists March 13, 2020 | Brown University

Event Schedule 8:30 – 9:20 Registration and Breakfast 9:20 – 9:30 Introduction and Welcome

9:30 – 10:00 Does Intrinsic Motivation Become More Influential as We Age? Julia Spaniol, Ryerson University 10:00 – 10:30 Behavioral and Brain Bases of Spatial Memory Deficits in Aging Lauren Richmond, Stony Brook University

10:30 – 10:45 Break

10:45 – 11:00 Influences of Age and Culture on Memory Angela Gutchess, Brandeis University 11:15 – 11:45 Dopamine in PET Aging Research Anne Berry, Brandeis University

11:45 – 1:15 Lunch on your own

1:30 – 2:00 Emotion Regulation and Aging: What I used to think, what I think now, and why Derek Isaacowitz, Northeastern University 2:00 – 2:30 How Older Adults Remeber Emotional Events Elizabeth Kensinger, Boston College

2:30 – 3:30 Growing Up in Aging Neuroscience Panel Julia Spaniol (Ryerson) Lauren Richmond (Stony Brook) Angela Gutchess (Brandeis) Anne Berry (Brandeis) Derek Isaacowitz (Northeastern) Elizabeth Kensinger (Boston College) Hwamee Oh (Brown)

3:45 – 5:30 Social Networking Reception Carney Institute for Brain Sciences (4th Floor) Event Location

All of the talks will take place in the Petteruti Lounge (2nd Floor) at the Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center. When you enter through the archway, go up the stairs. You can then take the elevator or the stairs to the second floor.

Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center Petteruti Lounge (2nd Floor) 75 Waterman Street Providence, RI, 02912

The Social Networking Reception will take place at the 4th floor of the Carney Institute for Brain Science (4th Floor)

Carney Institute for Brain Sciences 164 Angell Street Providence, RI, 02906

Campus Map:

About the Speakers Julia Spaniol Does Intrinsic Motivation become more influential as we age? ABSTRACT Motivation, the drive to expend effort towards a goal, shapes cognitive engagement and performance across the lifespan. Motivation can be either intrinsic (derived from personal goals and interests) or extrinsic (linked to instrumental reward or punishment). Successful aging may depend in no small measure on individuals’ motivation to initiate and sustain mentally challenging activities on a regular basis. Yet, dopaminergic and noradrenergic circuits critical for motivated cognition tend to show widespread decline in older adults. In this talk I review evidence from behavioral, ERP, and fMRI studies that support the hypothesis that the influence of extrinsic motivation on neurocognitive performance fades whereas intrinsic motivation becomes more influential as we age. I will also briefly discuss open questions for research on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and cognition in aging, as well as potential real-world implications of this research.

OFFICIAL BIO Julia earned her PhD in Psychology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 2003. Supervised by Ute Bayen, Julia’s doctoral work examined memory and decision processes in healthy aging using behavioral methods. During her postdoctoral positions with Dave Madden at Duke University Medical Center and with Cheryl Grady at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, Julia gained training in cognitive neuroscience methods and became interested in the interplay of affective and cognitive functions in aging. Since 2007 Julia has directed the Memory and Decision Processes Lab at Ryerson University in Toronto, and in 2014 she was named Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Aging. Julia and her trainees use behavioral and neuroscience approaches to study how extrinsic and intrinsic motivation influence cognitive control, memory, decision making, and future-oriented cognition in younger and older adults. Julia’s research has been continuously supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and other Canadian funding agencies. Julia is very involved in teaching and research training for undergraduate and graduate students and she prioritizes the inclusion of women and members of underrepresented groups in scientific training and research. To date Julia has graduated 4 PhDs, all of whom now hold academic or nonacademic positions directly related to their graduate training. Julia is also proud of the many undergraduate students who have gained research experience in her lab before moving on to a variety of graduate and professional programs.

UNOFFICIAL BIO I grew up in a small town in Saarland, a region in Southwest Germany that borders France and Luxembourg. My parents were high school teachers who instilled in me a sense of curiosity and a love of travel. After graduating high school, I took a gap year during which I lived in Puebla, Mexico, and volunteered in a nursing home. I learned to speak Spanish fluently (a skill I have sadly lost since) and developed an interest in aging and older adults. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to study, picked psychology on a whim, and ended up returning to Germany to attend Trier University. At Trier, I took introductory-level cognitive and lifespan-psychology courses with junior faculty members Axel Buchner and Klaus Rothermund (now at the Universities of Duesseldorf and Jena, respectively). I loved these courses and looked to Axel and Klaus as unofficial mentors. With their encouragement, I applied to graduate programs in the U.S. after 3 years in Trier, and was admitted to the University of Maryland and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After one year at Maryland, I moved south and completed my MA and PhD at UNC, where I faked interest in college basketball without much success. I met my (American) husband at UNC, and together we moved to Canada and somehow managed to land tenure-track jobs in the same city. Outside of academia, I am a major film nerd and I keep a spreadsheet – with rankings – of all the movies I’ve ever seen.

Lauren Richmond Behavioral and Brain Bases of Spatial Memory Deficits in Aging ABSTRACT Older adults are known to have more difficulty with spatial navigation and spatial memory than younger adults on average, but the reason for this age-related decrement in this type of skill is poorly understood. However, there is a large degree of inter-individual variability in this type of skill even in healthy younger samples. Using a novel naturalistic task to test spatial memory, behavioral data comparing younger and older adult performance on a variety of spatial memory measures will be discussed, as well as the neural basis for successful spatial memory performance in older adults.

OFFICIAL BIO Lauren Richmond is an Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science in the Dept of Psychology at Stony Brook University. She attended Marist college for her BA and MA degrees and Temple University for her PhD. Prior to her appointment at Stony Brook University, Lauren was a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. Lauren’s research focuses on everyday memory and performance of memory-based activities across the lifespan in ecological contexts. In her research, Lauren uses behavioral, neuroimaging, brain stimulation, and eye tracking methods. Lauren has conducted research in both healthy older adults and patient populations. Lauren’s research has been supported by the National Institute on Aging.

UNOFFICIAL BIO Lauren Richmond is from the suburbs of Philadelphia, PA and was a shy and quiet child who generally liked books more than people. Feeling the need to ‘get out’ of Pennsylvania at the end of high school, Lauren attended a small, teaching- oriented liberal arts school in New York’s Hudson Valley. This was a somewhat unusual choice: Lauren’s family was small and tight-knit, with no one living more than a 1-hour drive away from extended family members, but her parents encouraged and supported her in going a bit further out of the box. Lauren originally chose to major in Psychology with the intention of going into clinical psychology, but quickly realized that she would not be a good clinician. Still, Lauren liked her courses and professors and thus decided to switch gears towards exploring research-oriented careers in the field. Unfortunately, at a small, teaching-oriented liberal arts school the opportunities to get involved in faculty research were few and far between. Lauren was lucky enough to land a research-oriented internship opportunity at the Nathan Kline Institute working on a neuroimaging study in patients with schizophrenia during the spring semester of her junior year in college. This experience cemented her interest in pursuing cognitive neuroscience as a career, but she needed more research experience to be a competitive PhD applicant. In order to get it, Lauren then landed a research assistant position in a neurology lab where her day- to-day involved conducting cognitive testing on adult patients with dementia. Lauren started her PhD in 2009 at Temple University in a neuroscience lab around the time of the ‘working memory training’ craze and did research in this vein throughout her PhD. Lauren then went on to a postdoc at Washington University in St. Louis where she was able to gain a great deal of experience in cognitive aging and in testing memory performance in more ecological contexts, being funded first by a grant to her advisor and then by an individual NRSA. In 2018, Lauren landed back in the northeast much to the delight of her family in Pennsylvania. Outside of new faculty life, Lauren (still) enjoys reading, as well as walking her dog, cooking, and exploring her new hometown.

Angela Gutchess Influences of Age on Culture and Memory ABSTRACT In my talk, I will discuss research my lab has conducted investigating how aging and culture affect memory. I will focus on cross-cultural differences in memory, exploring how culture can act as a lens to shape information processing. This encompasses our work on how culture influences self-referencing effects, the use of categories in memory, and memory for specific visual details, and considers behavioral and neural measures as well as how these cultural differences could be impacted by aging.

OFFICIAL BIO Angela Gutchess is currently an Associate Professor of Psychology at Brandeis University, with appointments in Neuroscience and the Volen Center for Complex Systems. She attended Boston University for her BA/BS degrees and the University of Michigan for her Ph.D. Her research investigates the influence of age and culture on memory and social cognition using behavioral, neuroimaging (fMRI, ERP), and patient (amnestic mild cognitive impairment) methods, and has been supported by NIA, NSF, AFAR, the Alzheimer’s Association, and the Fulbright Program. Dr. Gutchess was elected to the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society and the Memory Disorders Research Society and currently serves as Associate Editor at Cognition and the Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences. She recently published a book, The Cognitive and Social Neuroscience of Aging, through the Cambridge University Press.

UNOFFICIAL BIO Angela Gutchess craved living in a city after moving around a fair amount as a child and graduating high school in rural Dryden, NY. Though she applied rather haphazardly to (rather expensive) colleges, she was fortunate to receive a full tuition scholarship to attend Boston University which got her to a city and a larger school. She’d always dreamed of being a teacher (her mom still thinks of her as one) and began as an English Education major. Her double-major in Psychology was for “fun”, as what could one possibly do with a degree in Psychology? She turned her back on student teaching after enjoying her Cognition course and beginning research in Mark Reinitz’s lab, embracing the use of data (as opposed to the argument alone that constituted her English papers). She learned about how PhD programs were structured and applied, again, rather haphazardly to programs with memory expertise and well- suited to her “two body problem”. After she wound up at Michigan, and continued with PhD advisor Denise Park for a year at Illinois, she found her way back to Boston in a postdoc with Dan Schacter; as she developed as an independent researcher, her passion for research blossomed (thanks in part to the other trainees in the lab!). She initially solved the two-body problem by landing a job in the Boston area at Brandeis; when the two-body problem was solved permanently, she pursued a Fulbright to embark on an “eat pray love” type journey to find herself. Her time in Istanbul was exhilarating. She managed to not screw up work too badly during this phase, got tenure, and is probably working too much while secretly trying to solve the problem of work-life balance.

Anne Berry Dopamine in PET Aging Research ABSTRACT In my talk, I will discuss how PET imaging can be used in the field of cognitive aging research. I will highlight insights the imaging of Alzheimer’s disease pathology has offered for interpreting age group differences in fMRI activation and cognitive performance. I will also discuss my recent PET research on age-related changes in the dopamine system, which has focused on the unexpected finding that dopamine synthesis may be elevated in older adults relative to young. This surprising evidence for upregulation of dopamine synthesis in aging has led to a series of studies testing the extent to which neurochemical compensation successfully restores optimal performance.

OFFICIAL BIO Anne earned her BA in Neuroscience from Oberlin College in 2006. Before graduate school, Anne worked as a research assistant in human clinical and cognitive neuroscience labs. Anne studied autism and ADHD with Dr. Blythe Corbett at the University of California, Davis and studied healthy aging with Dr. Adam Gazzaley at the University of California, San Francisco. Anne received her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Michigan in 2016 where she studied the role of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in attention with Drs. Martin Sarter and Cindy Lustig. Anne completed her postdoctoral training with Dr. Bill Jagust at the University of California, Berkeley where she studied dopaminergic mechanisms of cognitive decline in aging. In 2019 Anne began her position as Assistant Professor of Psychology at Brandeis University.

UNOFFICIAL BIO Anne was raised in Berkeley California by two Japanese history professors. Being an academic and working at a University was the family business. Perhaps due to a lack of imagination, Anne didn’t really consider or expose herself to other career options. Anne pursued science, a field outside her parent’s expertise, to avoid harassment/intrusive/know-it-all questioning from her parents around the Thanksgiving dinner table. Anne found jobs in interesting labs in California (where she is from) and the Midwest (where her partner is from). Anne has moved across the country 5 times and has moved her partner’s massive record collection 4 times. Anne tried out neuroscience research in rats and humans. The work in rats showed largely null results, but her research in humans was publishable. Anne became a human cognitive neuroscience researcher.

Derek Isaacowitz Emotion Regulation and Aging: What I used to think, what I think now, and why ABSTRACT For basically my whole career, I have been interested in trying to understand the mechanisms underlying older adults' generally positive affective experience. Based on socioemotional selectivity theory, I spent a number of years investigating age-related positivity effects in attention, and whether these may play a role in older adults' affective success. This then led to a wider investigation of emotion regulation strategies, including attentional deployment, that may vary by age. While our early work supported the age differences narrative, and sometimes the "older people are better" narrative, our more recent work has found much more similarity than differences among age groups in emotion regulation behavior, both in the lab and in everyday life. I will consider the implications of these findings for my own research trajectory as well as for the field in general.

OFFICIAL BIO Derek M. Isaacowitz is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Lifespan Emotional Development Lab at Northeastern University. He was an undergraduate student at Stanford University, and received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. His research on emotion regulation and social perception in the context of adult development and aging is funded by the National Institute on Aging, National Institute of Mental Health, and Velux Stiftung. This research has appeared in journals such as Psychological Science, Social and Psychological and Personality Science, Emotion, and Psychology and Aging. He is currently editor-in-chief of the Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences and he served as chair of the Social Psychology, Personality and Interpersonal Processes study section at NIH. He has been the recipient of the Springer Early Career Achievement Award from Division 20 (Adult Development and Aging) of the American Psychological Association, the Margret M. and Paul B. Baltes Foundation Award in Behavioral and Social Gerontology, for Outstanding Early Career Contributions, from the Gerontological Society of America, as well as teaching and mentoring awards.

UNOFFICIAL BIO Derek Isaacowitz grew up all around the New York city area (first Westchester, then Brooklyn, then Queens), and attended college at Stanford because they gave him the most financial aid and it was as far away as he could get from home. He was certain he would a History major but hated his first History course; other people in his dorm said Psychology was more interesting so he signed up for Intro Psych with Phil Zimbardo. They were right; it was interesting! At a dorm dinner with faculty he met Laura Carstensen and started working in her lab soon thereafter. He knew he wanted to go to grad school to study aging but couldn't decide how best to approach it, so he ended up in a clinical psych PhD program at Penn. Being ambivalent about clinical work, he withdrew from the internship match to take his first faculty position at Brandeis. He bought an eye tracker with start-up funds without ever having used or seen one before. Since then, he moved to Northeastern and has tried to take more calculated risks in his research.

Elizabeth Kensinger How Older Adults Remember Emotional Events ABSTRACT In this talk, I will first describe some similarities in the ways that young and older adults remember emotional events. In particular, across the adult lifespan individuals show emotional memory enhancements and also emotional memory trade-offs. I will then shift to focusing on ways in which age seems to affect the way that emotional experiences are remembered. In particular, older adults appear to remember negative events less vividly, and the negativity of emotional events can fade over time for older adults. I will describe the data that have led us to propose that these age-related differences reflect differences in the way that prefrontal processes are recruited as memories are initially brought to mind during retrieval.

OFFICIAL BIO Elizabeth A. Kensinger is Chairperson and Professor of Psychology at Boston College. She received her undergraduate degree in Psychology and Biology from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She joined the faculty of Boston College in 2006 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University. Her research combines behavioral testing and brain imaging techniques to better understand how the emotional content of information affects the processes that adults use to remember information. She has authored over 200 scientific articles and is the author of Emotional Memory Across the Adult Lifespan (2008, Psychology Press). Approximately 100 undergraduate students, 10 Ph.D. students, and 5 postdoctoral fellows have gained training in her laboratory. She is the recipient of research awards from societies including the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and the Association for Psychological Science. Her current research is supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Aging, and the National Science Foundation.

UNOFFICIAL BIO I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. I knew from an early age that I loved teaching and science - I would line my Cabbage Patch dolls up to teach them what they would need to know to become astronauts. I had expected to stay in the Midwest, but in the summer before my senior year of high school I received a scholarship to attend Harvard's summer program. Having gotten a taste of the amazing scientific research happening throughout Boston, I yearned for more; and my dreams came true as I began my education at Harvard. But like many Freshman, I was homesick, confused as I realized that I was not as invested in my math and chemistry double- major as I had thought I would be, and lacked confidence in my ability to succeed in college. I seriously considered transferring to a small college in Missouri after my first semester, but my mother encouraged me to give it one more semester and to choose my classes by wandering the bookstore and enrolling in the classes that had books that I really wanted to read. It turned out that most of those books were for courses offered within psychology and biology. A set of books that particularly caught my attention was on human memory; the course was taught by Daniel Schacter. It only took a few meetings for me to recognize that I found memory - its triumphs and failures - fascinating and could imagine spending the rest of my life studying them. And I have. I had to pinch myself when I received an offer for a job at Boston College, and the opportunity to bring human neuroscience research to BC, complementing the neuroscience research being conducted using animal models. Over the past decade, it has been amazing to be in a department that has worked together to enhance the neuroscience curriculum, research offerings, and to expand our faculty with neuroscience expertise. In my leisure time, I can most often be found playing with my six-year-old daughter. I also enjoy playing violin, baking, and decorating cakes and cookies. My family and I love to be outdoors, hiking or just sitting together and reading on a picnic blanket. While I prefer warmer weather, I am enjoying the challenge of learning to ski as an adult - and I am highly motivated as I want to be able to keep up with my husband and daughter as they speed down the mountain.

Hwamee Oh OFFICIAL BIO Hwamee Oh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and is also affiliated with the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences and Carney Institute for Brain Science at Brown University. Dr. Oh received her BA in English and MA in Psychology at Ewha Women’s University in Seoul, followed by a PhD in Biopsychology (with a concentration in Human Cognitive Neuroscience) from SUNY-Stony Brook in 2009. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship on the neuroscience of aging and Alzheimer’s disease at UC Berkeley, working with Dr. William Jagust, where she pioneered in many studies using multimodal neuroimaging approaches to elucidate the mechanisms of disease causation in Alzheimer’s disease and to extend our understanding of it to the preclinical state. Her work resulted in publications in prestigious journals and many awards including the 2014 de Leon Prize in Neuroimaging: New Investigator Award from the Alzheimer’s Association. Prior to Brown, she was an Assistant Professor at Columbia University from 2014-2017, in the Department of Neurology and Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain, and then Research Assistant Professor at Stony Brook from 2017-2019. At Brown, Dr. Oh extends her research on cognitive and neural changes due to normal aging and Alzheimer's disease pathology and individual difference factors contributing to the brain aging and cognition relationship using multimodality neuroimaging methods including PET and structural and functional MRI. UNOFFICIAL BIO Hwamee was an English Education major in college and became a tenured English teacher in a middle school in Seoul, which, back then, was considered as one of the most desired jobs for women in Korea. That was her parents’ dream job for her. After deciding to follow her genuine interest in brain science from her senior year in college, she quit the position and enrolled in a master’s program in psychology in Seoul, where she worked as part of an epidemiological study of senile dementia in South Korea. She came to the U.S. with her husband who was studying Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she joined the newly formed cognitive neuroscience laboratory of Dr. Brad Postle as the lab’s first research assistant. At the SUNY-Stony Brook Psychology graduate program, Hwamee enjoyed applying fMRI to study human working memory and visual processing, despite scanning participants only at night and weekends throughout her graduate study. Following her long-term interest in brain and cognitive aging, she completed her postdoc training in Dr. William Jagust’s laboratory at UC-Berkeley, while spending time with her two kids on the weekends. After spending some time at Columbia as a tenure-track assistant professor, Hwamee now runs her lab for Cognitive and Translational Neuroscience in Brown Psychiatry and Human Behavior and also serves Director of Imaging Research in the Memory and Aging program at Butler Hospital.