Lifestyle and cognition: a large-scale approach

Online cognitive testing provides unprecedented opportunities for exploring human brain function among the general population. Cambridge Brain Sciences Inc has created an online cognitive testing platform that has attracted more than 1.5M users and has hosted more than 300 studies of cognition. I plan to leverage their unique dataset to explore the interrelationship between demographic and lifestyle factors, and cognitive performance on a massive scale. For example, I will investigate how factors such as age, sleep, exercise and practice interact within this large population to impact the profile of cognitive performance. I will also conduct a series of large-scale online intervention studies to examine which of these factors causally influence particular cognitive domains and over what timescale. This unique partnership will shed new light on the links between brain function, structure and connectivity, and changes in lifestyle and cognitive performance and will certainly yield an abundance of publishable data.

Faculty Supervisor:

Andrea Soddu

Student:

Emily Nichols

Partner:

Cambridge Brain Sciences Inc

Discipline:

Physics / Astronomy

Sector:

Medical devices

University:

Program: