Rebecca Spencer, has received a five-year, $2.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, which renews an earlier grant from NIH’s National Institutes of Aging to support work on sleep and memory in older adults.

Spencer and colleagues will use the MRI in the Human Magnetic Resonance Center at the Institute of Applied Life Sciences to look at how memories are encoded in the brain before sleep and how they are changed by sleep compared to wakefulness in older adults compared to younger adults.

As she explains, “In the first five years of this work, we had several significant findings, and among them we found that sleep’s role in memory processing was particularly reduced by aging for tasks that required motor learning, for example, learning a sequence of finger movements. The good news is that when we looked at more ‘traditional’ learning tasks, things like learning a list of words, we found that sleep is still beneficial for older adults.”

In the next five years of the award, she adds, “we will continue to try to understand this. If we can understand why sleep’s role is preserved for declarative memory, then we can perhaps design interventions to improve sleep function for procedural memories.”

Spencer says her group predicts that there are different brain regions engaged in older adults when learning something, compared to young adults. By not engaging the critical brain area, older adults don’t tap into the ability for sleep to work on memories. “We predict that you MUST use the hippocampus on a task in order for that task to benefit from sleep,” she says.  

Another possibility the sleep researchers are considering is that older adults perhaps use the same brain areas, but to a lesser extent. “Older people just don’t learn things quite as deeply before sleep compared to young adults,” she suggests. “So we are going to do a study in which we over-train the older adults prior to sleep to see if that brings them up to the place the young adults are.”

In addition to the human MRI center at IALS, Spencer and colleagues will use high-density polysomnography during sleep in this series of experiments.

A further aspect of the research will be to explore the observation that changes in sleep precede the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, Spencer says. “Given that sleep benefits memory in healthy young adults, it has been proposed that changes in sleep may contribute to cognitive impairments in Alzheimer’s disease, particularly early in the disease. Yet what remains unknown, and is a long-term goal of our research, is whether sleep-dependent memory benefits persist even when changes in sleep and memory-encoding deficits that accompany healthy aging are observed.”

Understanding healthy brain aging and factors underlying cognitive resilience (such as sleep and hippocampal function) is essential to inform interventions and preventions for Alzheimer’s disease and other age-related diseases with impaired sleep, Spencer says.

The National Register of Health Service Psychologists has presented the 2018 Judy E. Hall Early Career Psychologist Award to Katherine Dixon-Gordon. The award recognizes excellence in a National Register credentialed psychologist with fewer than ten years of postdoctoral experience, and the associated $2,500 stipend supports a project that advances the mission, vision, and values of the National Register.

Dixon-Gordon was selected for the Hall award based on both her exceptional achievements as an Early Career Psychologist and her plan to use the $2,500 award stipend to better understand the gap between patients who need care and those who receive it by focusing on care provision of patients with psychological and substance use disorders in emergency departments. Her project will recruit emergency room providers and, using an experimental paradigm, examine the effect of patient co-occurring psychological disorders (present or absent) on the quality of care (e.g., referrals provided) using hypothetical vignettes. Potential barriers to receiving care and referrals will also be examined, including access to institutional resources (such as integrated psychologists), past training in intervention and efficacious treatments for psychological disorders, and negative attitudes.

Upon receiving the award, Dixon-Gordon said, “It is a great honor to receive the 2018 Judy E. Hall Early Career Psychologist Award. I appreciate the ways in which the National Register secures and promotes the profession of health service psychology. Our field has a great deal of knowledge and technology to enhance the health and well-being of individuals and communities. Yet, there remains a gap between those individuals who need psychological care and those who receive it. Given that emergency department patients often face obstacles to accessing the psychological care that they need, I am especially grateful to have the support of this award to explore how substance use and psychological diagnoses affect care provision in emergency department settings. The disproportionate reliance on emergency medicine among disadvantaged communities makes this work particularly important, and I am appreciative of the National Register for their support.”

Dixon-Gordon is a licensed clinical psychologist and Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology. Her research primarily focuses on the role of emotional processes in the development and maintenance of psychopathology, with an emphasis on borderline personality disorder. In her research, she employs laboratory-based methods to analyze the influence of emotional processes on other domains, such as interpersonal functioning. Her work has been published in several publications including Behavior Therapy and the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

The National Register of Health Service Psychologists is the largest credentialing organization for psychologists. Established in 1974, the independent nonprofit organization is dedicated to improving healthcare by identifying psychologists who meet specific credentialing standards to consumers, healthcare organizations, and regulatory bodies. 

Rothwell, Catherine. (2018, June). Katherine L. Dixon-Gordon, PhD, Named 2018 Judy E. Hall Early Career Psychologist Award Winner.  https://www.nationalregister.org/press-releases/katherine-l-dixon-gordon-phd-named-2018-judy-e-hall-early-career-psychologist-award-winner/