Kathy Xie is a doctoral student in Psychology concentrating in Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience. She is interested in using working memory training and noninvasive brain stimulation to decrease the negative effects of aging on cognition. She graduated from Northwestern University, with a B.S. in Psychology and Communication Sciences and Disorders. Outside of research, Kathy likes to read, watch TV, go to concerts, and eat her way through cities.
Email: kathyxie@umich.edu
CV: Kathy Xie C.V.
Current Project
Binding
Associative binding (also referred to as associative or relational memory) is memory for the relationship between single units of information. Binding is important for everyday tasks like remembering where your keys are (object-location binding) or remembering someone’s name (face-name binding). Older adults have more trouble remembering the relationship between items than the items themselves (Old & Naveh-Benjamin, 2008), causing researchers to theorize that a binding impairment is why older adults often fail to remember events in episodic memory (Bartsch et al., 2019). We are currently investigating the effects of binding during working memory on episodic memory.
Effects of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation
We are currently examining the effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on working memory training. We are interested to see if the addition of the non-invasive brain stimulation yields significant improvements in performance above and beyond the training alone.
Additional Readings:
Jantz, T. K., Katz, B., & Reuter-Lorenz, P. A. (2016). Uncertainty and promise: the effects of transcranial direct current stimulation on working memory. Current Behavioral Neuroscience Reports, 3(2), 109-121.