About Us

We experience life as a rich tapestry of sensory events that unfold across space and time. In order to interact with and adapt to our ever-changing world, it is essential that we learn and remember individual details of a given sensory event, as well as associations within and between events. Yet declines in learning and memory, especially for associations, are a hallmark feature of aging, even in older adults without dementia. And it’s not just about aging. Across the lifespan, some adults have worse memory than their peers.

The Laboratory of Aging and Neurocognitive Imaging (LANI lab) seeks to advance our understanding of these age-related differences in the way we acquire and retrieve information by (1) identifying the neural substrates of various forms of learning and memory and (2) examining the extent to which these neural substrates differ in adults across the lifespan.

We employ a combination of traditional and advanced structural and functional neuroimaging techniques, including ultra-high resolution and multi-compartment diffusion imaging, quantitative susceptibility mapping, and univariate and multivariate functional MRI. We focus on cognitively normal younger (18-30 years), older (65-89 years), and oldest-old (90+ years) adults, with the broader goal of identifying cognitive and neural markers of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s Disease.