Research Questions
In everyday life, we encounter a continuous stream of experiences naturally change over time and space. Moving through our life brings changes in both spatial context and time, which appear to organize and drive the encoding of episodic memories.
How does the spatial context influence memory encoding, retrieval and the interplay between episodic memories? How does this change in aging? How do people navigate in the real world and how does this change in aging?
In our day-to-day lives, the ability to learn and remember information is influenced by different variables including attention and cognitive flexibility as well as psychophysiological and ecological variables (e.g., stress and long-term social media usage). This set of projects examines how long-term social media usage and different facets of attention may interact to influence episodic memory and learning.
In aging and Alzheimer’s disease, memory performance may be impacted by the presence of Alzheimer’s disease pathology and well as AD-independent changes (e.g., frontal lobe cortical thickness, white matter hyperintensities). What are the variables that affect memory in aging and Alzheimer’s disease?
Publications
Puliyadi, V., Jayakumar, R. P., Johnson, J. L., Tran, T. T., Deshmukh, S. S., & Knierim, J. J. (2025). Landmark vector cells in the absence of visual input. Iscience, 28(12).
Tran, T.T., Madore, K.P., Tobin, K.E., Block, S.H., Puliyadi, V., Hsu, S.C., Preston, A.R., Bakker, A., Wagner, A.D. (2025). Mnemonic Bridging across Events relates to Individual-Differences in Sustained Attention in Younger and Older Adults.
Canada, K. L., Mazloum-Farzaghi, N., Rådman, G., Adams, J. N., Bakker, A., Baumeister, H., Berron, D., Bocchetta, M., Carr, V., Dalton, M.A., de Flores, R., Keresztes, A., La Joe, R., Mueller, S.G., Raz, N., Santini, T., Shaw, T., Stark, C.E.L., Tran, T.T., Wang, L., Wisse, L.E.M., Wustefeld, A., Yushkevich, P.A., Olsen, R.K., & Daugherty, A. (Accepted). A (Sub) field Guide to Quality Control in Hippocampal Subfield Segmentation on High-resolution T2-weighted MRI.
Wuestefeld, A., Baumeister, H., Adams, J. N., de Flores, R., Hodgetts, C., Mazloum-Farzaghi, N., Olsen, R.K., Puliyadi, V., Tran,T.T., Bakker, A., Canada, K.L., Dalton, M.A., Daugherty, A.M., La Joie, R., Wang L., Bedard, M., Buendia, E., Denning, A., del Mar Arroyo-Jimenez, M., Artacho-Perula, E., Irwin, D.J., Ittyerah R., Lee, E.B., Lim, S., del Pilar Marcos-Rabal, M., Iniguez de Onzo Martin, M.M., Munoz Lopez, M., de la Rosa Prieto, C., Schuck, T., Trotman, W., Vela A., Yushkevich, P., Amunts K., Augustinack, J., Ding, S.L., Insausti, R., Kedo, O., Berron, D., & Wisse, L. E. (In Press). Comparison of histological delineations of medial temporal lobe cortices by four independent neuroanatomy laboratories.Hippocampus.
Tran, T. T., Speck, C. L., Gallagher, M., & Bakker, A. (2022). Lateral entorhinal cortex dysfunction in amnestic mild cognitive impairment.Neurobiology of aging, 112, 151-160.
Choi, E. Y., Tian, L., Su, J. H., Radovan, M. T., Tourdias, T., Tran, T. T., Trelle, A.N., Mormino, E., Wagner A.D., & Rutt, B. K. (2022). Thalamic nuclei atrophy at high and heterogenous rates during cognitively unimpaired human aging. NeuroImage, 262, 119584.
Trelle, A.N., Carr, V.A., Wilson, E.N., Swarovski, M.S., Hunt, M.P, Toueg, T.N., Tran, T.T., Channappa, D., Corso, N.K., Thieu M.K., Jayakumar, M., Nadiadwala, A., Guo, A., Tanner, N.J., Bernstein, J.D., Litovsky, C.P., Guerin, S.A., Khazenzon, A.M., Harrison, M.B., Rutt, B.K., Deutsch, G.K., Chin, F.T., Davidzon, G.A., Hall, J.N., Sha, S.J., Fredericks, C.A., Andreasson, K.I., Kerchner, G.A., Wagner, A.D., Mormino, E.C. (2022). Association of CSF biomarkers with hippocampal-dependent memory in preclinical Alzheimer disease.Neurology.
Tran, T., Tobin, K. E., Block, S. H., Puliyadi, V., Gallagher, M., & Bakker, A. (2021). Effect of aging differs for memory of object identity and object position within a spatial context. Learning & Memory, 28(7), 239-247.
Corona‐Long, C. A., Tran, T. T., Chang, E., Speck, C. L., Gallagher, M., & Bakker, A. (2020). Comparison of male and female patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment: Hippocampal hyperactivity and pattern separation memory performance. Alzheimer's & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring, 12(1), e12043.
Jiang, A., Tran, T.T., Madison, F., Bakker, A. (2019). Acute stress-induced cortisol elevation enhances pattern separation. Learning and Memory, 26, 121-127.
Tran, T.T., Speck, C., Pisupati, A., Gallagher, M., Bakker, A. (2017). Increased hippocampal activation in ApoE-4 carriers and non-carriers with Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment. NeuroImage: Clinical, 13, 237-245.