Taraz Lee
University of Michigan, MI·Neuroscience
People constantly adjust their behavior when the world changes, whether that means tweaking a reach when muscles tire or resisting a habit, like driving the old route to work after changing jobs. These two projects ask how the brain makes such adjustments in thinking, not just in movement.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
- Topics
cognitive neuroscience
cerebellum
visual working memory
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Apr 2030
What they work on
- Test whether error-driven adaptation of spatial working memory shares the hallmark features of motor adaptation and uses the same computations as adapting saccades, the quick jumps of the eyes.
- Use neuroimaging to determine whether the cerebellum and other brain areas take part in visuocognitive adaptation and which regions respond to the errors that drive it.
- Briefly disrupt cerebellar activity with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to test whether the cerebellum is causally needed for visuocognitive and visuomotor adaptation.
- Validate a computational model of response preparation in conflict tasks using muscle signals recorded by electromyography (EMG), and compare it with sequential sampling models.
- Combine a forced-response method, the computational model, fMRI and TMS to test the causal role of the lateral prefrontal cortex in resolving conflict, and whether the mechanism generalizes across Stroop, Simon and Flanker tasks.
More about the research
One project tests whether the brain's internal map of space adapts to errors the same way movements do, and whether the cerebellum, a brain region known for fine-tuning movement, drives that adaptation. The other asks how people resolve conflict between automatic responses and goal-directed ones. Both combine behavioral experiments, computational models, brain imaging and brain stimulation.
Why it matters
Problems with eye movements, visual attention, memory and controlling automatic impulses appear in many conditions, including ADHD, dementia and depression. Clarifying how the cerebellum and prefrontal cortex adjust mental representations and resolve response conflict could help shape better treatment and rehabilitation plans for people with these deficits.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Alexandria Zakrzewski
Kansas State University, KS·Psychology
Establish a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and repetitive TMS suite combined with EEG, enabling virtual-lesion and neuromodulation experiments that causally test cognitive and neural plasticity.
Julie Golomb
Ohio State University, OH·Psychology
Test whether spatial distractions also disrupt nonspatial filters that control what enters visual working memory, using behavioral experiments, neuromodulation and computational analyses.
John Houde
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Neuroscience
Relate the location of cerebellar degeneration to specific speech symptoms such as articulation, pitch and timing problems in patients with cerebellar ataxia, using speech psychophysics experiments.
The school
University of Michigan: 124 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 963 research doctorates a year.
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