Work that began in 2023 is ready to share preliminary results at the 2026 Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in London, UK. I had the privilege to collaborate with Dr. Virginia Sturm and Dr. Eleanor Palser on their work in the Clinical Affective Neuroscience (CAN) Laboratory at UCSF. Their work centers on understanding affective symptoms and their mechanisms in both neurological and psychiatric disorders. Their team sought to develop a new cognitive task for their research participants. The aim was to determine whether patients suffering from frontotemporal dementia (FTD) could use connected speech to correctly identify the emotional expressions of illustrated individuals depicted at a café.
Today the Emotion Café Task is being tested in clinic and patients’ recorded responses were analyzed to produce a paper on emotional expression in connected speech. This preliminary study has been submitted to the AAIC for potential presentation.
I was also commissioned to create a market scene for a recent published book by Dr. Sturm and Dr. Bruce Miller, Mysteries of the Social Brain: Understanding Human Behavior Through Science.
DATA WITH COFFEE 