Your attention, please: Virginia Tech lab studies why focus shifts as we age

You have distractions around you all the time, and our ability to resist them successfully is what enables us to carry on with daily tasks. This project is a five-year NIH R01 grant that is focused on basically how our susceptibility to distraction changes as we get older and what that sort of links up within the brain. We're interested in a specific part of the brain called the locus coeruleus, which is involved in keeping you alert and awake. Some of the parts of the brain are impacted in the course of typical aging, but also in the context of Alzheimer's disease. If we can figure out whether we can actually improve attention, then the next step is to sort of think about specific interventions like non-invasive brain stimulation that might actually help strengthen that connectivity. Our participants are actually going through some training, some games that are supposed to exercise your attention. We also do look at a lot of social factors that could be related to the brain structure function like family relationships or stress. Graduate students are an integral part of this project. Both my student Merriam and also my student Elena have worked on this. It's a really truly like interdisciplinary environment. With human development I have like bits of biology, psychology, sociology, like everything is all really joined together. We're a cognitive neuroscience laboratory in the Department of Human Development and Family Science. It's sort of an intersection between social science and behavioral neuroscience to try to understand the a more holistic picture of how our brains develop over the course of our lives.