Sabina Srokova, PhD: Postdoctoral Fellow, Human Spatial Cognition Lab, University of Arizona
Monday, June 17, 2024,
2:30pm – 3:30pm,
ASA Koffler Great Room and Zoom
This year the Arizona Senior Academy has been inviting lecturers who can help us bett er understand how the aging brain changes. Sabina Srokova will explain two complementary neuroimaging MRI methodologies commonly used by cognitive neuroscientists to study the aging human brain. Structural MRI provides high-resolution images of the brain, making it ideal for examining the brain’s changing anatomy and age-related pathology. While structural MRI is useful in clinical settings, research suggests that anatomical measurements are not strong predictors of cognitive abilities or future risk for age-related neurodegenerative disorders. In contrast, promising findings come from functional MRI, which tracks the brain’s metabolic activity to identify which regions handle specific cognitive processes, such as memory. The strength of functional MRI lies in its ability to elucidate how different brain regions communicate and how certain patterns of brain activity change as we grow older.
Dr. Srokova is a postdoctoral fellow in the Psychology department at the University of Arizona. She obtained her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Center for Vital Longevity (University of Texas at Dallas), a research center that is fully dedicated to expanding our understanding of how cognition and the brain develop and change throughout our lives. Her research interests center on examining the effects of healthy aging on episodic and spatial memory function using functional MRI to study why brain areas that once responded selectively to specific types of information become less specialized in older age, and how this phenomenon may relate to age differences in memory abilities.
Compiled and edited by Rosemary Brown, Academy Village Volunteer
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