New funding initiatives

• Major new study in brain ageing (Cam-CAN)

  Research efforts to understand how the brain changes with age, from early to late adulthood, have been given a major boost by a new £5M grant from the BBSRC. The funding has been awarded to a team of scientists from the University of Cambridge Departments of Psychology, Public Health, Psychiatry, Clinical Neurosciences and Engineering, and from the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. This team, working as the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN), brings together world-leading expertise and cutting edge methods to understand how brain ageing in healthy people affects abilities like language, attention, emotion and memory.

  The ageing process does not have a uniform effect across the brain. Older people often struggle, for example, to recall the right word in a conversation, but can continue to expand their vocabulary throughout old age. Understanding what structures in the brain account for this variation will be a crucial first step in allowing more people to retain a range of mental abilities throughout their lives. Professor Lorraine K Tyler, who heads the research team, said "Our mental abilities don't suddenly start to decline as we enter retirement. In fact, many are retained right into our eighties and we are often too quick to attribute normal lapses like forgetfulness to the effects of age. Understanding the complexities of how ageing affects the brain will be crucial for older people to be able to live fulfilled lives and contribute fully to society."

  The study is unique in recruiting 3000 people aged 18-88 years, drawn from the general population, to create a library of information on how healthy brain ageing affects mental abilities to different degrees. Not only will this help identify older people who might be helped by therapies, but will also provide a lasting resource for future researchers to draw on. The research will establish a virtual "brain and behaviour" database which will hold behavioural, MRI and MEG data from a population-representative sample of 700 healthy adults. This will be a valuable, open-access resource for scientists interested in ageing, and a basis for longitudinal study of how our brain and our cognitive abilities change as we grow older.

  
  

• ERC Advanced Investigator grant

  An ERC Advanced Investigator Grant has been awarded to Professor Lorraine K Tyler. This 5-year programme will support her research programme 'PERCEPCON', investigating how the brain processes visual inputs as meaningful objects.

  
  

• Dunhill Medical Trust grant

  The Dunhill Medical Trust has funded a three-year project to examine the neural underpinnings of age-related changes in language production and comprehension. This research uses behavioural measures gathered in the lab, coupled with structural and functional imaging to address the question of what underpins good language performance across the lifespan. Particular focuses will include examining the reasons why older adults tend to suffer more word finding problems than younger adults and how the brain flexibly adapts across the adult lifespan to maintain good language comprehension.