Dr. Campbell is thankful for the nomination by her co-op/honours thesis student, Kiran Randhawa. 

The Campbell lab has been awarded a $340K Project Grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to look at the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying age-related declines in associative memory and to develop a novel technique to improve  older adults' memory for events in everyday life.

Associative memory, or the ability to link different pieces of information together (e.g., a face and a name), underlies our ability to remember entire events from our lives. This type of memory helps you remember details such as where you were and who you were with during a particular life event. Associative memory is known to decline with age and is one of the first forms of memory to be affected by dementia, which currently afflicts over half a million Canadians at an annual cost of $10.4 billion. Despite the heavy cost to Canadians, both financially and in terms of quality of life, we still have a poor understanding of why associative memory declines with age.

Thus, the primary goal of the proposed research is to advance our understanding of the
cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying age-related declines in associative memory and to develop a simple technique that older adults can use in everyday life to improve their memory for events.