Movement disorders that affect the basal ganglia, such as Parkinson鈥檚 and Huntington鈥檚 disease, are increasingly recognized as impairing much more than movement. Cognitive and behavioral symptoms are very common in these patients but remain poorly understood and difficult to treat. Her lab鈥檚 research aims to relate what we know about the role of the basal ganglia in healthy cognition to patients鈥� common cognitive symptoms such as executive dysfunction, difficulty in multi-tasking and apathy.
Examples of current projects include examining the role of the basal ganglia in orienting learning and memory towards motivationally significant goals, and examining the role of disturbed sleep in long-term memory in Parkinson鈥檚 patients. Her research combines behavioral experiments, pharmacological manipulations and neuroimaging in patients and healthy populations. Ultimately, the goal is to develop more precise models of cognitive dysfunction in patients, grounded in neurobiology, in order to develop and to reliably test novel behavioral and pharmacologic therapies.
