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• Early Decision II and Regular Decision: Saturday, Feb. 15Academics
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Anna Blumenthal
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Bio
Dr. Anna Blumenthal is a cognitive neuroscientist, jack of many trades but expert in memory and perception. Her goal is to build better models of these processes through including understudied populations. Her focus is on Africa, with projects in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Africa, and Namibia. Beyond specific projects, she uses community building and open-science to catalyze cognition research in Africa more broadly. In service of this, she co-founded the African Brain and Cognitive Development Network, and led a project to create ZolaBongo, an open-source app for collecting data on tablets without internet. Dr. Blumenthal enjoys exchanging knowledge with students in both the classroom and the lab, and looks forward to running EEG studies in the lab and the field. Outside of work, you can find her throwing a frisbee over and over and over for her border collie mix Alfred.
Education
PhD, Psychology (Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience), Western University
MS, Cognitive Science (Cognitive Neuroscience), University of Trento/SISSA
BA, Psychology, Drew University
Research Interests / Areas of Focus
Autiobiographical memory
Semantic memory
Visual attention
Trauma
Post-traumatic Stress Disorder
Executive Function
Hippocampus
Selected Publications
A Study of Trauma Memories from the 1994 Rwandan Genocide https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/j7gv5
Does threat familiarity and knowledge shape rapid visual attention? https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13506285.2023.2288359
How threat shapes attention and memory in the Himba, a remote people of Namibia. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00220221231175063
Hippocampus long-axis specialization throughout development: a meta-analysis. Human Brain Mapping, 2022. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hbm.26340
Activity in perirhinal and entorhinal cortex predicts observer-specific perceived visual similarities between objects. Elife, 2022. https://elifesciences.org/articles/66884?gclid=Cj0KCQiAy9msBhD0ARIsANbk0A_dmtW1K69viodWjy7gFPbMvaCVlUukGE_5aqIvJvKQaRNJpjR4HYQaAikxEALw_wcB
Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex controls the rapid neural response to visual threat: An ERP and rTMS study. Brain Research, 1784, 147850, 2022.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35231420/
Animacy and real-world size shape object representations in the medial temporal lobes. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29947037/
Abnormal semantic knowledge in a case of developmental amnesia. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28625659/
*Linking Words and Memory: How we Remember the Structure of Things. Written by: Lisa Munoz.
https://www.cogneurosociety.org/linking-words-and-memories-how-we-remember-the-structure-of-things/
Multiple neural representations of elementary logical connectives. Neuroimage, 135, 300-310, 2016. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27138210/
Grants
SSHRC Insight Development Grant for the project "Catalyzing cognition research in Africa: A novel approach to methods development," 61,461$
Small Grant from Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) for the project "Exploring the impact of exposure to violence on executive function, attention to threat, and mental health outcomes in South African children: A pilot study," 7,045$
Selected Presentations
Psycavi Observatoire: Understanding the Impact of Intergroup Violence and Armed Conflict on Mental Health Annual Meeting, June 2024. The African Brain and Cognitive Development (AfriBCD) Network: A step towards better representation of neurocognition research in Africa, Kigali, Rwanda.
Cognitive Neuroscience Society Annual Meeting, April 2024. The African Brain and Cognitive Development (AfriBCD) Network: A step towards better representation of neurocognition research in Africa, Toronto, Canada.
International Neurodevelopmental Group Meeting 2023, December, 2023. Introducing an Open Source Offline App for collecting Behavioral Data in the Field. Presenters: Anna Blumenthal and Caylee Cook. Virtual.
Psychonomics Society's 2023 Annual Meeting, November, 2023. Understanding the Structure of Autobiographical Memories: A Study of Trauma Memories from the 1994 Rwanda Genocide. San Francisco, CA.
CogSci2022 Conference, July, 2022. Visual attention to threat in the Himba, a remote people of Namibia. Toronto, ON.
Awards and Honors
Prix des Journées scientifiques CERVO, Award for best postdoctoral presentation
Cognitive Development Society Travel Award
University of Toronto Faculty of Arts and Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow Award,
Ontario Trillium Scholarship for Doctoral Study in Canada
University of Trento Merit Award
