Professor Lorraine K. Tyler

I head an interdisciplinary research group developing neurocognitive models of language and meaning in healthy and brain-damaged populations. We combine data from a variety of imaging techniques (fMRI, MEG, EEG) and relate patterns of activity in healthy people with those in brain-damaged patients. There are two main strands to our research: One overarching theme is to determine the extent to which neurocognitive functions are capable of reorganization and flexibility following brain changes due to healthy aging or brain damage. This involves studies on the relationship between cognitive loss and preservation in healthy aging, and studies which involve developing neurocognitive accounts of language function as a baseline for investigating the effects of acute and chronic stroke on language functions. Much of this research has been published in recent papers in Brain, Cerebral Cortex, PNAS and Journal of Neuroscience. A second main strand involves developing a biologically plausible neurocognitive account which explains how objects are processed as meaningful entities in a dynamic, recurrent network in the brain, by combining cognitive models with a hierarchical account of the processing of both the visual and semantic properties of objects in the ventral processing stream. This work has been published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Cerebral Cortex and Cognition.