Anna MacKay-Brandt, PhD
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
The Taub Institute
630 West 168th Street
New York, NY 10032
Phone: 212-305-2046
Fax: 212-342-1838
Email: am3609@columbia.edu
Ongoing Research:
- Cognitive enrichment in older adulthood. There is compelling evidence for the plasticity of cognitive function into older adulthood. I am interested in understanding the behavioral and neural mechanisms associated with changes related to cognitive training and cardiovascular exercise. In addition, I am examining individual differences in training performance and training benefit related to baseline health and cognition, as well as transfer of training to different cognitive domains and everyday functioning. The goal of this work is to establish the conditions under which cognitive and exercise interventions will have the greatest impact.
- Predictors of change in everyday functioning. I am interested in health, brain integrity, and cognitive predictors of change in everyday functioning measured prospectively in population-based cohorts of older adults. The goal of this examination is to identify appreciable changes in older adults everyday lives that may be amenable intervention.
- Other research activities. I am also interested the measurement of executive control across levels of analysis, from highly controlled laboratory-based studies, to multidimensional neuropsychological instruments, and how executive control ability may generalize to peformance- or report-based measures of everyday functioning.
Representative Publications
Connor, L. T., MacKay, A. J., & White, D. A. (2000). Working memory and executive functioning. Seminars in Speech and Language, 21, 109-119.
MacKay, A.J., Connor, L.T., Obler, L.K., & Albert, M.L. (2002). Noun and verb retrieval in healthy aging. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 8, 764-770.
MacKay, A.J., Connor, L.T., Storandt, M. (2005). Dementia does not explain correlation between age and scores on the Boston Naming Test. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, 20, 129-133.
Chen,W., Ding, Z. Zhang, S., MacKay-Brandt, A., Correia, S., Qu, H., Crow, J. A., Tate, D. A., Yan, Z., Peng, Q. (2010). A novel interface for interactive exploration of DTI fibers. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.