Professor Lorraine Tyler

Lorraine Tyler

University position

Professor

Professor Lorraine Tyler is pleased to consider applications from prospective PhD students.

Departments

Department of Psychology

Home page

http://csl.psychol.cam.ac.uk/ (personal home page)

Research Theme

Cognitive and Behavioural Neuroscience

Interests

I head an interdisciplinary research group working on the neurobiology of language 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 3 main strands to our research: (a) We develop neurocognitive accounts of language function as a baseline for investigating the effects of acute and chronic stroke on language functions and the possibility of functional recovery; (b) We study the neurocognition of healthy aging focussing on the extent to which preserved cognitive functions are the result of neural reorganisation and plasticity; (c) We have developed a neurocognitive model which explains how objects are processed in a dynamic, recurrent network in the brain, by combining cognitive models with a hierarchical account of object processing in the ventral processing stream.

Activations on individual subjects showing increased activation for cross-modal compared to unimodal stimuli in perirhinal cortex.
Activations on individual subjects showing increased activation for cross-modal compared to unimodal stimuli in perirhinal cortex.
View image full-size (1302x618 pixels)

Research Focus

Keywords

language

neurocognition

aging

stroke

imaging

Clinical conditions

Aphasia

Fronto-temporal dementia

Equipment

Electroencephalography (EEG)

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)

Magnetoencephalography (MEG)

Neuropsychological testing

Collaborators

Cambridge

William Marslen-Wilson

Meredith Shafto

Kirsten Taylor

United Kingdom

Emmanuel Stamatakis Web: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/

International

Deborah Burke Web: http://psych.pomona.edu/cogaging/

Andreas Monsch Web: http://www.memoryclinic.ch

Key publications

Tyler LK, Marslen-Wilson WD (in press), “Fronto-temporal brain systems supporting spoken language comprehension” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, Theme Issue ‘The perception of speech: from sound to meaning’

Taylor KI, Moss HE, Stamatakis EA, Tyler LK (2006), “Binding crossmodal object features in perirhinal cortex” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 103(21):8239-8244 Details

Tyler LK, Marslen-Wilson WD, Stamatakis EA (2005), “Differentiating lexical form, meaning and structure in the neural language system” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 102(23):8375-8380 Details