FERN Management
Kate Pirog Revill, PhD
Facilities Manager of FERN (Facility for Education and Research in Neuroscience)
Research Interests
At FERN, my goal is to help new and experienced users take advantage of the capabilities of fMRI to address a diverse range of research questions. I have expertise in fMRI experiment design and data analysis using multiple data analysis packages (AFNI, SPM, FSL). I also have experience with ASL and DTI data and am learning more about structural and functional connectivity analyses. I am currently involved in many projects, investigating questions about language processing, motor control and rehabilitation, perceptual attention and awareness, and memory and decision-making.
My own research background focuses on how young and older adult listeners understand spoken language, a process that healthy adults perform with exceptional skill despite the rapid pace at which words in fluent speech are presented. Using eyetracking, I examine how context (your knowledge of the world around you or the words you have already heard) affects the time course of spoken word recognition. I also use fMRI to measure the activation of brain-based semantic representations in response to transiently ambiguous speech input. By combining these different perspectives and methodologies, I hope to better understand how spoken word recognition and word meaning interact with each other.