People » Nichole Lighthall

Lab Website: http://sciences.ucf.edu/psychology/lighthalllab/

Dr. Nichole Lighthall is an Assistant Professor of Psychology in the Human Factors and Cognitive program. She holds a B.A. in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley and a Ph.D. in gerontology from the University of Southern California. Before coming to the University of Central Florida, Dr. Lighthall worked as a postdoc in the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Duke Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development. The goal of her research is to develop a neural model of decision processing in human aging that can be used to identify age-related vulnerabilities and pathways to compensation. She is particularly interested in how age-related changes to cognitive and affective components of decision making impact decision processing and quality. In conducting this research, the Lighthall Lab utilizes an array of methodological approaches including cognitive tasks, manipulations of emotion and task difficulty, biomarker sampling, computational modeling, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

*Dr. Lighthall will be on maternity leave during the Fall 2019 semester.