BSc (Waterloo), MA, PhD (Toronto)
Governing Board Member- Psychonomic Society
Past-President- Canadian Society for Brain Behaviour & Cognitive Sciences
Mentorship Award- Women in Cognitive Sciences Canada
Fellow- Canadian Society for Brain Behaviour & Cognitive Sciences, Psychonomic Society, and Association for Psychological Science
Ontario Early Researcher Award- Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science
New Researcher Award- Canadian Psychological Association
Watch a video about Dr. Fernandes' lab
Fernandes lab Info and Links to apply
Research interests
My research program involves developing an understanding of the cognitive processes, and brain regions, involved in memory and language. I am interested in knowing how we encode new information, how it is organized and represented in the brain, and how we reactivate the information during retrieval. I am particularly interested in how these change as people age. I evaluate the ability of young adults and seniors to carry out a memory task under conditions in which there is another on-going task competing for their attention. I also use neuroimaging (functional magnetic resonance imaging: fMRI) to identify the brain regions and networks mediating memory processing; these are used to determine how the strategy and brain regions contributing to memory change as we age. A related research interest lies in understanding how different types of information (words, numbers, symbols, spatial layouts) are represented and organized in the brain, through the use of behavioural paradigms and fMRI. My other line of research examines the relationship between neuropsychological and neuroimaging methods of evaluation of language localization.
Funded by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and Ontario Ministry of Research & Innovation.