Russell Poldrack
| Russell A. Poldrack | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
May 18, 1967 Houston, TX, USA |
| Residence | San Francisco, CA USA |
| Website | www |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience |
| Institutions | Stanford University (professor) |
Russell Alan (Russ) Poldrack (born 1967) is an American psychologist and neuroscientist. He is a professor of Psychology at Stanford University, member of the Stanford Neuroscience Institute. and director of the Stanford Center for Reproducible Neuroscience.
Poldrack received his bachelor's degree in Psychology from Baylor University in 1989, and his PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1995, working with Neal J. Cohen. From 1995 to 1999, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, working with John Gabrieli. Prior to his appointment at Stanford in 2014, he held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School, UCLA, and the University of Texas at Austin.
Poldrack’s earliest work studied the brain systems involved in nondeclarative memory. His dissertation work examined the relation between stimulus-specific learning and general skill in a motor skill learning task. His first neuroimaging paper demonstrated changes in brain activity associated with learning of mirror-reading skill, showing that it was associated with a shift from activity in parietal regions toward activation in inferior temporal regions. He later showed that learning of classification learning was associated with a tradeoff between activity in the basal ganglia and medial temporal lobe, and proposed that this reflected a competition between declarative and nondeclarative memory systems in learning. In 2006, his group published work showing that this tradeoff between systems is modulated by dual-task interference
Poldrack’s group has also studied the brain systems involved in the inhibition of motor responses. With Adam Aron, Poldrack published two papers that established the role of a circuit involving right prefrontal cortex and the subthalamic nucleus in the inhibition of motor responses. They subsequently showed that it was possible to predict individual differences in inhibitory behavior from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data using high-dimensional regression machines.
In 2007, Poldrack and colleagues demonstrated that brain activity during decisions under risk exhibited the pattern of gain- and loss-responsiveness predicted by prospect theory. In subsequent work, they found that risky decisions in the Balloon Analog Risk Task could be predicted from fMRI data, and that these decisions were related to a balance of activity between large-scale brain systems involved in value processing and cognitive control respectively.
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