Dulas is a new faculty member at Binghamton University starting Fall 2023. His research seeks to understand the distinct and interactive roles of the hippocampus and PFC in relational memory, the ability to bind together information into relational representations and to retrieve/use those representations in service of ongoing goals. Specifically, Dulas is interested in how these systems are impacted by healthy aging and brain injury. Using neuroimaging, eye-tracking and neuropsychological methods, Dulas seeks to differentiate healthy age-related changes in memory and its neural correlates from those that may be tied to injury and/or pathology. For example, he has demonstrated that healthy aging may be typified by under-recruitment of PFC processes, underlying their memory impairments. In contrast, alterations in hippocampal function may suggest pathological aging and/or injury. Critically, his work has also shown that under-recruitment effects in healthy older adults can be ameliorated with environmental support. Dulas currently collaborates with Melissa Duff at Vanderbilt University and Neal Cohen at University of Illinois as part of a project investigating the impact of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) on the cognitive and neural processes of relational memory. Recent findings have shown that TBI impairs relational memory even when information must only be maintained for a few seconds and that TBI disrupts all domains of relational memory. Accepting graduate students for Fall 2024.
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