Donald J. Bolger, Assistant Professor of Human Development & Quantitative Methodology, studies how the brain learns to read and what are the cognitive and neural bases of reading and language ability and disability. The core of his laboratory's research focus is on these key issues of reading from neurobiological, cognitive, developmental and educational perspectives. Reading is a complex cognitive skill that requires that small complex visual forms (letters) be accurately recognized and integrated with linguistic information from sound and meaning with the ultimate purpose of achieving comprehension. Thus, typical and atypical reading and language ability may be reflected in quite heterogeneous patterns of cortical activation stemming from visual, auditory or supramodal processing regions.Dr. Bolger employs multiple methods in structural and functional MRI to understand the dynamics of cortical networks in skilled and disabled readers, including functional connectivity analyses and diffusion imaging. Dr. Bolger’s lab is increasingly focusing on how the effects of intervention are reflected in cortex, specifically using executive function and working memory training paradigms. From school-based and cross-sectional paradigms to online adult training tasks, our work combines innovative and complex methodologies the combine MRI with event-related potentials (ERP) to understand development and learning.Dr. Bolger is an affiliate of the Center for Advanced Study of Language (casl.umd.edu) and a founding member of the Maryland Neuroimaging Center (mnc.umd.edu ).
Collaborators:
Elizabeth Redcay, Michael Dougherty, Jared Novick, Michael Bunting, Yasmeen Farouqi-Shah, Bob Slevc
