Current Studies
Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study
The Â鶹ÊÓƵ serves as one of the sites for the , a ground-breaking study of adolescent brain development in over 11,000 individuals in the United States. The study is designed to understand how the brain develops during the teen years, and the way in which environmental influences - ranging from exercise to social interactions to experimentation with drugs - influences such development. The work at Colorado is a collaboration with the Institute for Behavioral Genetics. Prof. John Hewitt, the Director of IBG, (shown at far right) serves at the co-Principal investigator for this project. Colorado, along with sites at the University of Minnesota, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Washington University in St. Louis are studying twins to understand how genetic and environmental factors influence the development of the adolescent brain.
ABCD-USA Consortium: Twin Research Project
U01 DA041120A (Banich and Hewitt, Multiple Project Investigators) 9/30/2015-05/31/2020
Colorado Cognitive Neuroimaging Family Emotion Research (CoNiFER)
The goal of this grant is to understand how brain processes involved in executive function and cognitive control develop during adolescence, and how the development of those processes may be affected and reciprocally influence emotional processing. This study involves a multi-level approach with information obtained on prefrontal neurotransmitters levels, regional brain activation, behavioral performance, and assessment of factors linked to emotional functioning. This project is a colloboration with at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at Brandeis University.
Prefrontal Mechanisms of Selection: Disrupted in Internalizing Psychopathology?
1R01MH105501 (Banich and Hankin, Multiple Principal Investigators) 8/21/2015-5/31/2020
Clearing the Contents of Working Memory
The goal of this project is to apply machine learning techniques to understand the neural mechanisms by which information is cleared from working memory and the way in which representations of such information are altered by these clearing processes. Such processes are disrupted across a large number of psychiatic disorders ranging from depression to anxiety to schizophrenia to obsessive-compulsive disorder. This project is a collaboration with at the University of Texas at Austin
Clearing the Contents of Working Memory: Mechanisms and Representations
1R21MH108848-01A1 (Banich and Lewis-Peacock, Multiple Principal Investigators) 06/20/2015-03/31/2019
Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Learning Disability
The goal of this high-risk/high-reward project is to investigate, using a new and novel theoretical perspective, the neural underpinnings of learning disability. In this project we posit that each of the three major processes that may underlie learning disability as proposed by our center – slowed processing speed, domain specific deficits (separately in reading and in math), and executive dysfunction - can each be linked to specific underlying neural processes.
Differential Diagnosis in Learning Disability: Project III Functional and Anatomical investigations of Domain-specific and Domain-General Alterations in Neural Systems underlying Math & Reading Difficulty
P50 HD027802 (Center P.I., Erik Willcutt; Project PI., Banich) 10/1/2017 – 6/30/2022