Home

News

Content

2024

Sep 2024 4

Our newest grant was just funded! The title of our grant is “The use of high-resolution fMRI to elucidate the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the benefits of environmental support on associative memory in younger and older adults.” Nancy brought in a special treat to announce that our grant was successfully funded.

Apr 2024 16

Congrats to the everyone for their awesome presentations at CNS Toronto 2024!

Apr 2024 4

Congrats to Becky on her funding of the Graduate Research Fellowship through the National Science Foundation

Feb 2024 28

Congrats Alexa, on your first publication as a first author!

2023

Jul 2023 13

Congrats to our lab manager, Ashley, for heading off to grad school. Good luck!

Jul 2023 10

We’d like to officially welcome John, Spencer, and Luke to the CANLab! We are excited to see what you will accomplish.

May 2023 16

Congrats to Jordan for successfully defending his dissertation and graduating!

Apr 2023 18

A huge congrats to Cat for receiving the T32 Fellowship to work with Nancy and Janine Kwapis!

Apr 2023 12

We are proud of our research assistants for presenting at Penn State’s annual Undergraduate Exhibition, congrats to both Cheyna and Gitana

Mar 2023 31

The CANLab enjoyed attending and participating at the final Lenten Dinner at Good Shepherd Catholic Church!

Mar 2023 24

A big congrats to Jordan for his RGSO poster presentation!

Mar 2023 23

The CANLab had a great time presenting at CNS!

Feb 2023 23

Big congratulations to our graduate student Cat who was awarded a Fellowship to the University of Utah’s Advanced Statistical Methods in Neuroimaging & Genetics Course. We are all so proud!

2022

Nov 2022 29

Congratulations to Jordan for receiving the STAR (Superior Teaching and Research) Award, a recognition and financial support from the College of the Liberal Arts for excellence in teaching, research, and service!!!

Nov 2022 29

The CANLab had a great time presenting “Maintaining Healthy Memory as we Age” at Juniper Village

Nov 2022 23

The CANLab had a great time presenting at Psychonomics in Boston this year!! Glad to be back to in person conferences.

Seen below Cat and Ashley presenting their poster and Jordan presenting his talk.

Oct 2022 20

Congratulations to Cat, Sarah, and others for their new publication!

Jul 2022 14

The CANLab and Dr. Dennis had a wonderful time speaking at Foxdale about Maintaining Healthy Memory as we Age

Jul 2022 6

Welcome to CAN Lab’s newest lab manager, Adam Levy!

Jun 2022 8

The CANLab had a great day volunteering at OLLI’s 25th Anniversary Event!

May 2022 25

Congratulations to now Dr. Courtney Gerver, Ph.D. on successfully defending her dissertation!!!

May 2022 25

Congratulations to Courtney for accepting a position as a User Experience Research Specialist at Nationwide. We will miss you!

May 2022 25

A huge congratulations for Courtney winning first place for her poster at the Penn State Graduate Exhibition

2021

Nov 2021 5

Congrats to Courtney for being awarded the RGSO Dissertation Support!

Oct 2021 21

We are excited to announce that we have officially begun in-person testing with older and younger adults! Our RA’s are ecstatic to be testing in person. (Image: Sofia (an RA) in the testing room for older adults)

RA Sophia conducts Adult Memory Research

Sep 2021 30

We are excited to announce that we have been awarded a National Institute on Aging grant to help better understand the neural mechanisms underlying the benefits of unitization on associative memory in young and older adults.

Sep 2021 14

Dr. Dennis will be looking for a PhD graduate student for the 2021 application cycle (starting Fall 2022).

Please contact the Lab Manager or Dr. Dennis for further questions.

For general information about Pennsylvania State’s Department of Psychology Graduate Study, please read here.

Aug 2021 3

Congratulations to Courtney for successfully proposing her Dissertation.

Jul 2021 1

The CANLab is back in the lab and ready to work!

Left to Right: Cat, Courtney, Jordan, Dr. Nancy Dennis, Ashley, Sarah

Jun 2021 14

Welcome to CAN Lab’s newest lab manager, Ashley Steinkrauss!

Jun 2021 3

Congrats to Kyle, Cat, Harini, and Jordan for their recent publication ‘The effect of memory cue duration on directed forgetting performance in healthy aging’!

May 2021 7

Congratulations to Dr. Nancy Dennis for being promoted to Full Professor at Penn State!

Apr 2021 23

Congratulations to Courtney who was selected as a 2021 Penn State Clinical and Translational Science Translational Science Fellowship summer scholar!

2020

Aug 2020 30

Congrats to Jordan for successfully completing his comprehensive exam!

Aug 2020 3

Congrats to Jordan for successfully completing his comprehensive exam!

Jul 2020 2

Congratulations to Courtney on passing her comprehensive exam!

Jul 2020 2

Congratulations to Courtney on passing her comprehensive exam!

Jun 2020 15

Congratulations to Courtney for her publication of her Master’s paper, ‘Examining the neural basis of congruent and incongruent configural contexts during associate retrieval’!

Jun 2020 12

Congratulations to now Dr. Dan Elbich, Ph.D. on successfully defending his dissertation!!!

elbich defense photo

Jun 2020 1

We are excited to announce that we have been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to study the contribution of individual differences of domain-general and domain-specific components of false memories in younger and older adults.

Apr 2020 15

Welcome to CAN Lab’s newest graduate student, Catherine Carpenter!

2019

Nov 2019 27

Congratulations to Courtney and previous lab manager Kyle Kurkela for their recent paper ‘Shared neural recruitment across working memory and motor control tasks as a function of task difficulty and age’ being accepted at Aging, Neuropsychologia, and Cognition.

Oct 2019 27

Congratulations to Courtney for her first paper ‘Different types of associative encoding evoke differential processing in both younger and older adults: evidence from univariate and multivariate analyses’ being accepted at Neuropsychologia!

Oct 2019 25

Congratulations to Jordan for being selected as Psi Chi Society Graduate Teaching Assistant of the year!

Apr 2019 26

Congratulations to Dan for successfully proposing his Dissertation.

Apr 2019 12

Congratulations to Courtney for her successfully defending her Masters and advancing to candidacy.

Apr 2019 9

Congratulations to Courtney for her NSF GRFP honorable mention.

Mar 2019 24

CANLab had a blast presenting at CNS!

Jan 2019 10

Congratulations to Jordan and previous graduate student Dr. Caitlin Bowman for their recent paper ‘Sensory Representations Supporting Memory Specificity: Age Effects on Behavioral and Neural Discriminability’ being accepted at Journal of Neuroscience.

Jan 2019 10

Congratulations to Courtney for her acceptance to the Duke Social Neuroscience & Neuroeconomics summer program.

2018

Aug 2019 3

After a 9 year career in the CANLab as an undergraduate and graduate student, we can finally say CONGRATULATIONS to now Dr. Christina Webb, Ph.D. on her successful dissertation defense!!!

Dec 2018 5

Congratulations to Jordan for advancing to Ph.D. candidacy!

Jul 2018 29

We had a wonderful time this summer with visiting researchers from Elon University Chloe Hultman

bottom row, second from left) and Kayla McGraw (bottom row, far right)!

May 2018 31

Many, many congratulations to now Dr. John McCormick-Huhn, Ph.D. on successfully defending his dissertation!!!

May 2018 24

CONGRATULATIONS to now Dr. Indira Turney, Ph.D. on successfully defending her dissertation!!!

May 2018 21

Congrats Christina on publishing your paper The effect of useful field of view training on brain activity and connectivity in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B!

May 2018 15

Dr. Nancy Dennis and Christina were recently featured on WJAC-TV 6 news about their recent research on false memories and aging.

Mar 2018 1

A big congratulations to Indira for winning the Alumni Association Dissertation Award! This award is considered to be among the most prestigious available to Penn State graduate students and recognizes outstanding achievement in scholarship and professional accomplishment. What a fantastic accomplishment!

Feb 2018 23

Congratulations, Christina, on being awarded the highly prestigious Penn State Alumni Association Scholarship for Penn State Alumni in the Graduate School! Well-deserved recognition!

Jan 2018 22

The CANLab welcomed in a number of new research assistants this semester!

2017

Jun 2018 1

We are happy to welcome students from Elon University on board to participate in summer research. While here, they will work on collecting data for new collaboration project “Examine Associative Memory in Aging.”

Nov 2017 2

A huge congratulations to Christina for being awarded dissertation support funds from the Liberal Arts Research and Graduate Studies Office (RGSO)! We are so happy for you!

Oct 2017 25

Congratulations to Dr. Dennis and Indira on publishing their paper, The Influence of Perceptual Similarity and Individual Differences on False Memories in Aging! This will be published in Neurobiology of Aging.

Oct 2017 19

John, we just can’t keep up! Congratulations on yet another publication: Same Face, Same Place, Different Memory: Manner of Presentation Modulates the Associative Deficit in Older Adults. This will appear in Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition.

Oct 2017 17

Congratulations to John and Dr. Dennis on their paper, Older Adults’ Associative Memory is Modified by Manner of Presentation at Encoding and Retrieval! This will be published in Psychology and Aging, and is their third accepted publication in as many weeks!

Oct 2017 10

Congratulations to John on publishing TWO papers this October! His first one, titled Repeated Study of Items With and Without Repeated Context: Aging Effects on Recollection and Familiarity, will be published in Memory. His second one, titled Using Attribute Amnesia to Test the Limits of Hyper-Binding and Associative Deficits in Working Memory will be published in Psychology and Aging.

Aug 2017 22

Welcome CAN Lab’s newest graduate students, Courtney Gray & Jordan Chamberlain!

Jun 2017 10

Congratulations to John on his marriage to Kaitlin McCormick from Penn State’s social area! We wish you a lifetime of love and happiness.

Photo credit to Laurel Hill Photography.

2016

May 2018 31

Congratulations to Angela Grant (graduate student collaborator) on publishing her breadth project with Dr. Dennis titled Increased processing speed in young adult bilinguals: evidence from source memory judgments in the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.

Dec 2016 19

We were featured on the Penn State’s Social, Life, and Engineering Sciences Imaging Center’s (SLEIC) website for our recent publications.

Oct 2016 26

She’s at it AGAIN! Indira Turney was awarded our college’s Research & Graduate Studies Office (RGSO) Dissertation Award. Congrats Indira!!!

Oct 2016 4

Congrats to Christina for publishing her master’s work titled What’s the gist? The influence of schemas on the neural correlates underlying true and false memories in the journal Neuropsychologia.

This paper details cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the retrieval of different types of items when studied within a highly schematic context. Congrats, Tina!!!

Sep 2016 9

Congrats again to Indira for publishing her master’s thesis titled Elucidating the neural correlates of related false memories using a systematic measure of perceptual relatedness, which details her master’s work on perceptual relatedness in false memories using a unique design with morphed faces, in the journal NeuroImage. Congrats, Indira!!

Aug 2016 30

Congrats to our most senior graduate student, Indira Turney for obtaining an award from Penn state’s Social, Life, and Engineering Sciences Imaging Center to support her dissertation. She will use the award to examine the neural effects of memory training for improving episodic memory in older adults. Indira is on a roll, she was also recently selected to receive an award that enables her to be named an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Minority Ph.D. scholar. This award includes a budget to fund Indira’s research and professional development. Way to go Indira – Congratulations!!!

Jul 2016 27

Congrats to our very own, Indira, for publishing a new article titled Exploring the influence of encoding format on subsequent memory in the journal Memory. Congrats, Indira!!

Jun 2016 3

We are excited to begin new collaboration (with support of an NIH grant to “Examine Associative Memory in Aging”) with Amy Overman and her students at Elon Univeristy!!

Read more about this here: https://www.elon.edu/E-Net/Article/133202

May 2016 3

Congratulations to our very own Christina Webb who was awarded a Predoctoral Fellowship on PSU’s Center for Healthy Aging’s T32 training grant.

Apr 2016 21

The lab would like to congratulate former graduate student, Caitlin, for publishing her article titled The neural basis of recollection rejection: increases in hippocampal-prefrontal connectivity in the absence of a shared recall-to-reject and target recollection network in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Go Cait!!

2015

Dec 2015 18

The lab would like to congratulate our lab manager, Kyle, for publishing his False Memory Meta-analysis in the journal Neuropsychologia. Congrats, Kyle!!

Sep 2015 22

The pictures are in from Christina’s wedding! The Lab had a blast dancing and celebrating with Mr. and Mrs. Webb. Congrats again Tina!!

Jun 2015 24

The CAN Lab volunteered to help run Centre County’s annual Senior Games, a series of mental and atheltic games for Centre County’s senior citizens.

. . .

The CAN Lab posing for a photo, with our Lab Manager Kyle realizing how short his co-workers are. 2 Our undergrate RAs Jimmy and Shalome greeting and directing participants to the Senior Games’ various events. 3. John and Kyle rebounding for a Basketball Shootout participant, Truman. 4. Kyle, Truman, and John: a future Championship 3 v 3 Basketball Team!!

Jun 2015 2