Marcus Sefranek
Postdoctoral Research Associate
- Brain & Cognition (Nobre Lab)
BA&Sc.
I am DPhil student in the Brain and Cognition lab, based at the Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity (OHBA). I am supervised by Prof. Kia Nobre and Dr. Nahid Zokaei, and funded by the British Research Council.
Broadly, my interests lie in understanding how memory and attention are altered over the course of healthy aging or disease. During my DPhil I will investigate differences between normal forgetting that increases as we age versus forgetting related to neuronal loss as seen in Alzheimer’s disease. Further, I will examine the implications that these types of forgetting in memory have for direction of attention. To do this research I will make use of both behavioral experiments and neuroimaging methods (sMRI and fMRI).
First and foremost, I hope that this research will help us to better understand the relationship between forgetting and attention. Also, investigation of this relationship in healthy individuals may guide research towards better understanding how and why neural systems upholding memory and attention breakdown in diseases like Alzheimer’s.
Prior to starting my doctorate, I completed my BA&Sc. at McGill University in Honors Cognitive Science. Over the course of my bachelor’s degree, I conducted research towards better understanding subjective weighing of attributes in artwork (Fellows lab) and improving clinical measures used to assess cognitive status in Alzheimer’s disease (Koski Lab). I also investigated the relationship between Amyloid and Tau proteins and cognitive decline seen in Alzheimer’s disease using multi-modal PET imaging (Rosa-Neto Lab).
Recent publications
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Does effort-cost decision-making relate to real-world motivation in people living with HIV?
Journal article
Castaneda G. et al, (2021), J Clin Exp Neuropsychol, 43, 1032 - 1043
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Amyloid-dependent and amyloid-independent effects of Tau in individuals without dementia.
Journal article
Therriault J. et al, (2021), Ann Clin Transl Neurol, 8, 2083 - 2092
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Ventromedial Frontal Lobe Damage Alters how Specific Attributes are Weighed in Subjective Valuation.
Journal article
Vaidya AR. et al, (2018), Cereb Cortex, 28, 3857 - 3867