Contact Information
405 North Mathews Avenue
Urbana, IL 61801
Biography
Aron K. Barbey is Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He directs the Intelligence, Learning, and Plasticity Initiative, and the Decision Neuroscience Laboratory at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. He received a Ph.D. in Psychology from Emory University in 2007 and completed a research fellowship in Cognitive Neuroscience at the National Institutes of Health in 2011. Professor Barbey’s research investigates the neural foundations of human intelligence and decision making, with particular emphasis on enhancing these functions through cognitive neuroscience, physical fitness, and nutritional intervention. He has won more than $25 million in private and federal research grants since joining the University of Illinois in 2011, receiving support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the NIH BRAIN Initiative, the research division of the United States Director of National Intelligence (IARPA), the Department of Defense (DARPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and private industry. He has received multiple academic achievement awards and serves on the editorial board of Intelligence, Thinking & Reasoning, and NeuroImage.
Research Description
Our research investigates the principles of brain organization that underlie executive control, reasoning and decision making. Through a combination of human behavioral, computational modeling, functional neuroimaging (fMRI) and neuropsychological patient data, we seek to uncover the mechanisms that shape higher cognitive processes and to develop predictive models of brain function that link neural systems to specific patterns of inference and behavior. An important motivation for our work is the development of a theoretically sound foundation for research on the relationship between disturbances of brain function and their manifestation as disorders of thought and behavior in psychiatric illness and neurological disease.
Education
Ph.D., Emory University
Additional Campus Affiliations
Affiliate, Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology
Professor, Psychology
Professor, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
Professor, Speech and Hearing Science
Professor, Bioengineering
Adjunct Professor, Internal Medicine
External Links
Recent Publications
Di Pietro, V., Yakoub, K. M., Caruso, G., Lazzarino, G., Signoretti, S., Barbey, A. K., Tavazzi, B., Lazzarino, G., Belli, A., & Amorini, A. M. (2020). Antioxidant Therapies in Traumatic Brain Injury. Antioxidants, 9(3), [260]. https://doi.org/10.3390/antiox9030260
Hammer, R., Paul, E. J., Hillman, C. H., Kramer, A. F., Cohen, N. J., & Barbey, A. K. (2019). Individual differences in analogical reasoning revealed by multivariate task-based functional brain imaging. NeuroImage, 184, 993-1004. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.09.011
Harshman, S. W., Pitsch, R. L., Schaeublin, N. M., Smith, Z. K., Strayer, K. E., Phelps, M. S., Qualley, A. V., Cowan, D. W., Rose, S. D., O'Connor, M. L., Eckerle, J. J., Das, T., Barbey, A. K., Strang, A. J., & Martin, J. A. (2019). Metabolomic stability of exercise-induced sweat. Journal of Chromatography B: Analytical Technologies in the Biomedical and Life Sciences, 1126-1127, [121763]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jchromb.2019.121763
Key, M. N., Zwilling, C. E., Talukdar, T., & Barbey, A. K. (2019). Essential Amino Acids, Vitamins, and Minerals Moderate the Relationship between the Right Frontal Pole and Measures of Memory. Molecular Nutrition and Food Research, 63(15), [1801048]. https://doi.org/10.1002/mnfr.201801048
Román, F. J., Colom, R., Hillman, C. H., Kramer, A. F., Cohen, N. J., & Barbey, A. K. (2019). Cognitive and neural architecture of decision making competence. NeuroImage, 199, 172-183. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.05.076