Dr Karen Campbell

My research examines the cognitive and neural changes that accompany normal human ageing. In my doctoral work at the University of Toronto, jointly supervised by Profs. Lynn Hasher and Cheryl Grady, I examined age differences in attentional control and how these differences affect older adults' knowledge of the world around them. Using fMRI, we found that older adults under-recruit the frontoparietal attentional control network and this leads them to encode more distraction than younger adults. Ongoing research suggests that age differences in this frontoparietal network fluctuate with time of testing, with minimal differences seen in the morning (an optimal time of day for most older adults).

Now as a postdoctoral research associate with the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (www.cam-can.com), I am continuing to examine age differences in the recruitment of widespread neural networks and relating these to concomitant differences in cognition and underlying brain structure.