Behavior, cognition, and emotion play a critical role in health, and people are increasingly being called upon to make choices concerning lifestyle and medical treatment for themselves and their families. These choices have short- and long-term implications for health and the quality of life. The quality of these choices depends on the decision-makers' cognitive and emotional health, as well as their ability to extract and utilize relevant knowledge from available sources including the Internet, television, and health care providers.
Several Beckman Institute research groups are exploring this type of decision-making. Researchers are investigating the mechanisms that support both normal and abnormal perception, memory, language, emotion, and decision-making. Some researchers are focusing on normal/abnormal memory; visual and auditory perception; executive control; emotion; and specific cognitive and emotional changes in neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders such as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, stroke, schizophrenia, anxiety, and depression.
The near-term future plan for Understanding Normal and Abnormal Cognition and Emotion includes:
- Creating cross-process databases for examining how different cognitive, emotional, and psychosocial factors interact in healthy and unhealthy functioning throughout a person’s lifespan
- Developing a Memory Center that fosters the study of memory-related issues and also explores how to strengthen rehabilitation efforts and education
- Building integrated research projects that investigate the detailed time course of language production and comprehension using eye tracking, ERPs, and EROS methods of measurement
- Modeling neural mechanisms in mental illness comorbidity, such as when anxiety or depression occur, creating particularly severe dysfunction and suffering
- Developing research teams that combine expertise in the substantive perceptual and cognitive issues with the wealth of computational modeling expertise in the areas of neural information modeling, cognitive modeling, and the modeling of socioeconomic behavior
- Creating a multi-university NIMH-funded Conte Center that works to understand the neural networks that support memory process, as well as their plasticity in response to development and neurological insult