Dr. Donald Stuss

Dr. Donald Stuss’s seminal work in the field of frontal lobe research has greatly influenced our understanding of frontal lobe functions and their role in memory, cognition and consciousness. The former vice-president of Research at Baycrest and founding director of the Rotman Research Institute, Dr. Stuss spearheaded the growth of the RRI to its world-renowned status today as a leader in neuroscience research. During his career, Dr. Stuss has received numerous honours and awards including being named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Member of the Order of Ontario. In 2010, he was appointed president and scientific director of the newly launched Ontario Brain Institute (OBI), where he will continue to help shape the future of brain research, translation and innovation.

Dr. Morris Moscovitch

Over the past 25 years, Dr. Morris Moscovitch has built an impressive body of research in the areas of memory, attention and face-recognition. His outstanding career and enormous impact on the field of cognitive neuroscience was recently honoured by the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS), which awarded Dr. Moscovitich its inaugural 2012 Distinguished Career Contributions Award. This award recognizes senior cognitive neuroscientists for their distinguished career, leadership and mentoring in the field. Dr. Moscovitch holds the Glassman Chair in Neuropsychology and Aging and is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Dr. Gordon Winocur

One of the Rotman Research Institute’s original pioneers, Dr. Gordon Winocur has made an immense contribution to the field of neuroscience with his research into memory and how it changes through the process of normal aging or through injury. In an important brain injury study with rats, which garnered him the Donald T. Stuss Award for Research Excellence, Dr. Winocur demonstrated that memories could be preserved after severe amnesia – findings that have potential implications for new therapies to help people with brain injuries regain their independence.

Refined Intervention

Today’s standard neurological tests are often not sensitive enough to detect the subtle cognitive deficits resulting from brain damage. Dr. Brian Levine and his team are working to change that. Using novel assessment and rehabilitation techniques – coupled with new brain imaging tools such as structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and magnetoencephalography (MEG ) – Dr. Levine’s research aims to enable a better understanding of real-life memory and attention processes and how they are affected by brain disease.

Dr. Levine and his team have developed and are testing targeted interventions designed to help patients recovering from brain damage improve executive functions such as working memory, planning and goal management.

Fast Learners

How does the brain acquire knowledge? Dr. Asaf Gilboa’s research is devoted to finding the answers. He and Dr. Morris Moscovitch, together with Tali Sharon from Haifa University, have found that a learning mechanism called “fast mapping” allowed patients with dense amnesia to learn and retain new information.

In Dr. Gilboa’s lab, researchers are investigating the principles that allow patients to tap into the brain’s primordial memory processes to quickly learn words and facts they had never heard before, like names of exotic fruits and animals. The researchers found that learning is incidental – picked up in the process of doing something else – rather than through repetition. This process is similar to the way many researchers believe young children learn new words. The findings from this research may offer far-reaching implications for rehabilitation techniques for people who suffer from memory loss.

Driven by Distraction

There is plenty of research that shows that older adults are more easily distracted than young adults. Can this be used to their benefit? In a recent study, Dr. Lynn Hasher and her team found that older participants, when asked to perform a task, were more bothered by extraneous information present in an environment. They also found that those who were easily distracted were also better able to use the extraneous information to solve problems later in the study. This research and others suggest that it’s possible to employ carefully chosen distraction to boost the cognitive functioning of older adults. Dr. Hasher continues to refine her research with the hope that it will eventually lead to interventions that can help people maintain memory performance.