Examples of Research Projects that we hope to start, funding permitting
(1) Can training balance or listening to much-loved music improve children’s EFs?
The same or overlapping brain regions underlie both cognitive and motor functions. There is strong evidence to suggest that doing simple balance exercises for just a few minutes, a few times a week, can improve executive functions. We’d like to test that.
Music improves mood and a happy mood leads to better executive functions. Certainly the cognitive functioning of older adults is helped by listening to music. Would the same or even greater benefits accrue to children? We’d like to test that.
(2) Might evidence-based changes to karate instruction improve the social, emotional, & EF benefits of karate?
Martial arts, like karate, show excellent results for improving EFs, far better than most other approaches tried for improving executive functions.
A karate black-belt in our lab, with years and years of experience in training children with and without disabilities in karate, has developed a new approach we would like to test.
(3) Is it wise for university students to take stimulants to try to boost their test scores?
Psychostimulants aid cognitive functioning in persons with ADHD. Stimulants can’t be used to diagnose ADHD because some people without ADHD can also benefit from stimulants. This has led some college students to think that stimulants could improve their performance and grades in college.
Stimulants only help, however, if the dopamine level in your brain is too low. For most people that is not the case. Moreover, stress increases the level of dopamine in prefrontal cortex, and many college students are stressed (especially around exam time).
Hence, we predict that stimulants actually impair the cognitive functions of most non-ADHD college students, and we would like to test that.
(4) What if we told ADHD children that a particular test has been designed to be ADHD-friendly?
What if we told them that on a test we have, those with ADHD score as well or better than those without ADHD?
Our expectations for ourselves have a major effect on how well we do. Work on stereotype threat has shown that stereotypes affect our expectations for ourselves and cause people to perform worse. Research also shows that anything that counteracts the stereotype (like saying a particular test has been constructed so the stereotype doesn’t apply), improves performance.
To what extent are some children with ADHD not doing well in school simply because they don’t believe in themselves? If we help them believe they can succeed, will they?
(5) When a program reduces stress and improves the EFs of survivors of trauma or severe early life stress, is PFC modulation of the amygdala restored?
When there might be danger, the amygdala starts firing, alerting the rest of the brain. When there really is danger, it is prefrontal cortex that calms down the amygdala and gets it to stop firing. It does that by sending an excitatory project to inhibitory interneurons within the amygdala, exciting them to send an inhibitory projection to amygdala principal neurons.
However, if a person was exposed to severe stress or trauma growing up, that person can be left with PTSD where the functional communication between prefrontal cortex and the amygdala has broken down so that although prefrontal tries to send word to the amygdala, the message does not get through. The amygdala keeps firing and the person remains in an anxious, hyper-vigilant state, constantly on the alert for possible danger.
Recently, success in helping people recover from childhood trauma and PTSD has been demonstrated by the Niroga Institute’s dynamic mindfulness program and by MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Regardless of the method used, we predict that in those who successfully recover, neuroimaging will show that the functional communication between prefrontal cortex and the amygdala has been restored. We’d like to test this. No one has ever looked at whether normal prefrontal-amygdala communication can be restored in survivors of early life stress or any trauma. This could be a major breakthrough in treatment.
(6) Might therapeutic re-enactment (using acting techniques) succeed in helping military veterans recover from PTSD, especially since other methods that have been tried so far have met with such limited success?
The few small studies using therapeutic re-enactment with Veterans have shown excellent results. There are several reasons for this success including that expressing one’s feelings as a character in a play can feel a great deal less threatening, overwhelming, or self-revelatory than saying them "in real life." Realizing they are not alone and feeling the support of their fellow Vets involved in the theatrical production can be huge. We hope to investigate this more rigorously with a focus on the underlying causal factors at work.
