Affective and Autonomic Neuroscience

The Center for Affective and Automatic Neuroscience (CAAN) investigates how the affective and autonomic changes of adulthood shape cognition, emotion, and the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s disease — and how safe, scalable physiological interventions can influence these trajectories. The program integrates four strands:

• Emotion-cognition interactions in aging: mapping the brain mechanisms that allow older adults to maintain emotional well-being despite the physiological changes of aging.
• Brainstem imaging methods: developing next-generation 7T multimodal measures of locus coeruleus structure and function.
• Autonomic trajectories from age 20–60: the first longitudinal study to track parasympathetic decline and sympathetic shifts across this age range alongside Alzheimer’s biomarkers and locus coeruleus functional and structural measures, testing whether midlife autonomic changes trigger the earliest pathology of Alzheimer’s disease.
• Causal tests of how autonomic activity can influence brain health and Alzheimer’s risk using breathing interventions: randomized trials using slow-paced and 4-7-8 breathing to influence autonomic balance and measure downstream effects on AD biomarkers, cerebrovascular reactivity, emotion, and cognition.