Valorie N. Salimpoor, Chair

I first became interested in neuropsychology while I was completing my undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto, where I worked on several different projects involving gender differences in cognitive processing, applications of virtual reality for neuropsychological assessment, and the ability of odors to cue emotional memories.  I then pursued a Masters degree in clinical psychology at York University, where I researched cognitive function in childhood disorders and executive and frontal lobe function in children with autism.  This was followed by a year of research and training at Stanford University, where I looked at neural correlates of typical and atypical mathematical cognition and repetition priming.  I am currently attending Mc Gill University, working in Dr. Robert Zatorre's laboratory.  My current research interests involve functional brain imaging, emotion, and reward.  More specifically, I am interested in the neural correlates of rewarding experiences and the neurochemical (e.g., dopamine) responses involved in the experience of intense emotion.  We are using music to explore these links. I am applying connectivity measures to examine the temporal aspects of reward processing in the brain when people listen to new music that they end up liking for the first time.  Ultimately, we are trying to understand why music has such powerful effects on the human brain!