Brian Gold, Ph.D.
Position
Associate Professor
Address
Address
University of Kentucky
MN214 Wm R Willard Medical Ed Building
Lexington, KY 40536-0298
Departmental Affiliation
Anatomy and Neurobiology and Sanders-Brown Center on Aging
Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory webpage
Research Interests
Cognitive Neuroscience
We investigate the neural organization of core cognitive processes in young adults and how this organization may change with normal aging and mild dementia. We have been pursuing 4 main lines of research: (1) language processes/structures that allow us to recognize visual words; (2) cognitive control processes/structures that allow us to flexibly alternate between multiple tasks (3) how the cognitive/neural organization of these processes changes with aging; (4) pre-symptomatic detection of dementia.
We adopt a multimodal imaging approach, including fMRI and multiple forms of structural MRI (see our Publications page for more details). For example, we have explored the neural bases of age-related changes in task switching using a combined fMRI-DTI approach (Gold et al., 2010). In the area of pre-symptomatic detection of dementia, we have been using structural MRI to explore volumetric changes (Martin et al., 2010) and DTI to explore changes in white matter microstructure (Smith et al., 2010; Gold et al., 2010).
We gratefully acknowledge funding support from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation in carrying out these projects.
Some Recent Publications
Gold BT, Powell DK, Andersen AH, Smith CD (2010). Alterations in multiple measures of white matter integrity in normal women at high risk for Alzheimer's disease. Neuroimage 52:1487-1494.
Gold BT, Jiang Y, Jicha GA, & Smith CD (2010). Functional response in ventral temporal cortex differentiates mild cognitive impairment from normal aging. Human Brain Mapping 31: 1249-1259.
Smith CD, Chebrolu H, Andersen AH, Powell DA, Lovell MA, Xiong S, & Gold BT (2010). White matter diffusion alterations in normal women at risk of Alzheimer's disease. Neurobiology of Aging 31: 1122-1131.
Martin SB, Smith CD, Collins HR, Schmitt FA, & Gold BT (2010). Evidence that volume of anterior medial temporal lobe is reduced in seniors destined for mild cognitive impairment. Neurobiology of Aging 31: 1099-1106.
Gold BT, Powell DK, Xuan L, Jicha GA, & Smith CD (2010). Age-related slowing of task switching is associated with decreased integrity of frontoparietal white matter. Neurobiology of Aging 31: 512-522.
Gold BT, Andersen AH, Jicha GA, & Smith CD (2009). Aging influences the neural correlates of lexical decision but not automatic semantic priming. Cerebral Cortex 19: 2671-2679.
Gold BT & Rastle K (2007). Neural correlates of morphological decomposition during visual word recognition. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 19: 1983-1993.
Gold BT, Powell, DK, Xuan L, Jiang Y, & Hardy, PA. (2007). Speed of lexical decision correlates with diffusion anisotropy in left parietal and frontal white matter: evidence from diffusion tensor imaging. Neuropsychologia 45: 2439-2446.
Gold BT, Balota DA, Jones SJ, Powell DK, Smith CD, & Andersen AH (2006). Dissociation of automatic and strategic lexical-semantics: Functional magnetic resonance imaging evidence for differing roles of multiple frontotemporal regions. The Journal of Neuroscience 26: 6523-6532.