Laboratory of Healthy Cognitive Aging, Harvard Medical School

Welcome to the Lab of Healthy Cognitive Aging!

As increasing numbers of Americans are living to advanced ages and understanding what allows older adults to sustain meaningful levels of intellectual functioning and independence has become a major public health issue.

Led by Dr. Kirk Daffner, the Wimberly Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, our laboratory focuses on the neurological foundations of executive control functions and attention to novelty. We have been investigating the ways in which information processing of cognitively successful older individuals differs from that of cognitively less successful ones. The lab uses the exquisite temporal resolution of event-related potentials (ERPs) to study the relationships between sensory-perceptual encoding, selective attention, and capacity-limited controlled processing. We are also actively investigating factors that promote cognitive health and neural plasticity in older adults.