June 2023
- BIG NEWS! The Memory, Aging, and Cognitive Control Research Laboratory will be moving to Binghamton University in New York this Fall!
May 2023
- Welcome to our lab new undergraduate researchers: Chris Perry, Selene Tan, and Carrie Sansom!
- Congratulations to Hannah for successfully defending her thesis titled, "Effects of Loneliness on Brain Structure and Cognition across the Lifespan,"
April 2023
- Congrats to Shayne for being selected by the Society of Clinical Geropsychology Awards Committee as the winner of the 2023 SCG Student Research Award for the submission of the paper Cognitive Variation in Telehealth Cognitive Screening Predicts Dementia Incidence and Cognitive Performance, by S. Lin and R. Allen.
- Congratulations to Mikenzi for getting a first author manuscript accepted in The Gerontologist, titled, "Self-reported Chronic Stress is Unique Across Lifetime Periods: A Test of Competing Structural Equation Models."
February 2023
- Congratulations to Shayne for their successful clinical match placement at the Missouri Health Sciences Psychology Consortium!
December 2022
- Congratulations to Hillary for getting the award for Outstanding Teaching by a Master’s Student!
September 2022
- See Dr. McDonough's talk on 25 years of Neurocognitive Aging Theories. Passcode: Gox2%&c1
- Interested in a primer on memory and cognition in aging and Alzheimer's disease? Request a copy of our new chapter!
August 2022
- Congrats to Sarah Letang for graduating with her Ph.D.!
May 2022
- Congrats to Sarah Letang for successfully defending her dissertation titled, "Significant Memory Concerns: The Moderating Effect on Biomarkers Of Alzheimer’s Disease And Learning And Memory Performance."
April 2022
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March 2022

- Congrats to Brian Kent on being selected as a recipient of the 2022 Randall Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award for his efforts on his study entitled “Bridging the Neural Correlates Between Episodic Memory and Spatial Navigation using Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy in Healthy and Pathological Aging”!
December 2021
- Congratulations to Hillary for successfully defending her Masters thesis titled, "THE INFLUENCE OF AGING ON THE NEURAL CORRELATES OF JUDGMENTS OF LEARNING!"
- Congratulations to Mikenzi for successfully defending her Masters thesis titled, "EFFECTS OF A TEACHING EXPECTANCY ON METACOGNITION AND LEARNING!"
November 2021
- Our lab's research was featured in the Psychonomic Society's conference newsletter! Only two studies were chosen from the conference, this seems like a pretty big deal to me!
July 2021
- The Office of Academic Affairs and Academic Advisors Association sent me a certificate of "Excellence in Academic Advising" for the past year. Thank you to those who nominated me! This was highly unexpected and I feel very humbled!
April 2021
- Congratulations to Shayne Lin for the Bobby A. Prince Award! This award is given to a student who demonstrated academic excellence in clinical psychology!
- Dr. McDonough receives tenure and promotion to Associate Professor!
February 2021
- Congratulations to Sarah Letang! She matched to a clinical neuropsychology internship during Phase I matches. That is amazing news and her ideal placement!
- Also Congratulations to Tasnuva Enam who secured a tenure-track Assistant Professor position of Psychology at North South University!
January 2021
- We have a new Shiny App to take a peak at the data from the Alabama Brain Study on Risk for Dementia!
October 2020
- UA is getting a new MRI! How exciting! Click here to read more about it!
September 2020
- Our recent review on Risk for Alzheimer’s Disease: A Review of Long-term Episodic Memory Encoding and Retrieval fMRI Studies is featured on University of Tampa's website!
May 2020
- Another congratulations, but this time to Shayne Lin for his Paper Presentation Merit Award from The Southeastern Universities Graduate Research Symposium!
- Congratulations to Hillary Erwin for successfully proposing her thesis!
- Congratulations to Dr. Tasnuva Enam for successfully defending her dissertation!
- Dr. McDonough received the Distinguished Faculty Research Award from the Psychology Department!
March 2020
- Our own Jordan Bolling will be receiving the 2020 Randall Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award for her project, “Brain Stimulation of the Prefrontal Cortex During Foreign Language Learning.” Congrats!
February 2020
- Congratulations to Jordan Bolling who got accepted in the PhD program at the University of Arizona! Only a couple more interviews to go!
January 2020
- Congratulations to Tori King who got accepted into the PhD program at The Ohio State University! We wish you the best of luck!
- Story from Kaiser Health News just published that features our collaborative intervention with Dr. Cynthia Green!
November 2019
- We just received funding to follow longitudinally our participants from the Alabama Brain Study on Risk for Dementia!
- Our new paper was just accepted using the Alabama Brain Study on Risk for Dementia data on Episodic Memory Consolidation.
July 2019
- One summer goal: Figure out how to get Advanced Normalization Tools (ANTs) to work and reprocess all data from the Alabama Brain Study on Risk for Dementia. What a difference it makes!
May 2019
- Dr. McDonough's special issue editorial debut is finally here! Check out "Biological Markers of Aging and Mental Health" and the five awesome studies that were selected to contribute to this issue here!
April 2019
- Today, we had our annual Honors Day Assembly for the University and the Psychology Department. We give recognition to undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and staff who have excelled in various ways throughout the year.
- Congratulations to Ashley Stinson for winning the award for Outstanding Undergraduate Major in Psychology, Significant Contributions to Research in Psychology, Recognition of Psychology Honors Students, and Academic Excellence by a Major in Psychology! That's four awards in one afternoon, amazing!
- Also congratulations to Kyle Kraemer for receiving the Paul S. Siegel-Steven Apprentice-Dunn Teaching Award!
- Congratulations to Ashley Stinson for winning the award for Outstanding Undergraduate Major in Psychology, Significant Contributions to Research in Psychology, Recognition of Psychology Honors Students, and Academic Excellence by a Major in Psychology! That's four awards in one afternoon, amazing!
- Learn about the progress of our latest aging well intervention that was highlighted on SeniorHousingNews.com.
March 2019
- Congrats to the Ashley Stinson (above left), William Miller (above center), Tori King (above right), and Brandon Lucas (not shown) who presented amazing posters at this year's URCA conference!
- A new clinical geropsychology graduate student has accepted admission to the lab! We look forward to welcoming Shayne Lin from the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs!
Dr. McDonough recently joined the ACAR Brain Health Intervention Study, Dr. Cynthia Green, creator of the Total Brain Health Toolboxes, Bill Tamulonis of Acts Center for Applied Research (ACAR), and Theresa Perry, Acts Corporate Director of Wellness for a live webcast to all Acts Communities about our important cognitive training study.
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February 2019
- Congrats to Ashley Stinson who won the first annual Hazel Phelps Jones Award! This award recognizes a senior majoring in the natural or social sciences, and who exhibits exemplary scholarship, leadership and service to The University of Alabama.
- A new clinical geropsychology graduate student has accepted admission to the lab! We look forward to welcoming Hannah Apostolou from the University of Michigan!
January 2019

- Upon checking my mailbox, I was pleasantly surprised to see this Super Reviewer thermos from The Gerontologist!
- Congratulations to Ashley Stinson who won the Elizabeth A. Klonoff Diversifying Clinical Psychology Poster Award at the CUDCP conference! Her poster was titled, "Examining the Relationship Between Vascular Health and Brain Activation During an Association Episodic Memory Task in Middle-Aged and Older Adults."
- For a related submission, see our preprint at bioRxiv!
November 2018
October 2018
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August 2018
- Our story made the front cover of Today's Geriatric Medicine!
June 2018
- Welcome Jordan Puskas-Sullivan from Boston University! She will be interning in our lab for the summer!
May 2018
- Our recent paper, "The effect of cellphones on attention and learning: The influences of time, distraction, and nomophobia," was featured on Psypost.org!
- We had multiple posters at the Cognitive Aging Conference, what fun!
April 2018
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March 2018
- We have two new experimental graduate students joining the lab this Fall! Welcome Mikenzi Brasfield and Hillary Erwin!
October 2017
- Our article was cited in an article from the Wall Street Journal written by the Pulitzer Prize winning Nicholas Carr entitled, "How Smartphones Hijack Our Minds."
September 2017
- Two manuscripts were accepted this month: "Beta-Amyloid and Cortical Thickness Reveal Racial Disparities in Preclinical Alzheimer’s Disease" in Neuroimage: Clinical and "The Relation Between White Matter Microstructure and Network Complexity: Implications for Processing Efficiency" in Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience.
August 2017
- Welcome Sarah Letang, a new Clinical Psychology graduate student, to our lab!
- Congratulations to Kyle Kraemer for winning a travel award to the annual Psychonomic Society conference!
July 2017
- Congratulations to Tasnuva Enam for her poster acceptance at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society this Fall entitled, "False memory and aging: the role of cognitive reserve in young-old and old-old adults."
- Congratulations to Kyle Kraemer for his poster acceptance and the Graduate Travel Award for the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society this Fall entitled, "Understanding Metamemory: A General Ability or Separate Systems?"
May 2017
- Dr. McDonough presented his findings entitled, "Beta-Amyloid and Cortical Thickness Reveal Racial Disparities in Preclinical Alzheimer’s Disease. "
- Dr. McDonough received the 2017 Charles Barkley Health Disparities Research Investigator Awards for first place in oral presentations at the 2017 UAB Health Disparities Research Symposium.
March 2017
- April 9th at 5pm PST on KABC 790AM, Dr. McDonough will be featured the radio show In Your Right Mind!
February 2017

- New feature in EurekAlert!
- The lab is getting filmed working in Freesurfer for a fancy new video for the Psychology department!
- Congratulations to CeCe Hessler who got accepted into the Physical Therapy program at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis!
- "The busier the better: greater busyness is associated with better cognition" was recently featured on Texas NPR! Click here to read about!
June 2016

May 2016
- Dr. McDonough received The Matilda White Riley Early Stage Investigator Honors.
- Dr. McDonough was accepted to the 2016 Butler-Williams Scholar Program at NIA.
- Dr. McDonough is giving a talk in Granada, Spain entitled, "Fluid and crystallized discrepancy in healthy adults: The relationship with beta-amyloid and cortical thickness."
- Dr. McDonough is giving a talk in Cologne, Germany entitled, "Functional and molecular imaging in normal aging: Evidence from lifespan and intervention studies."
April 2016
- A new article was accepted in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience entitled, "The busier the better: greater busyness is associated with better cognition."
- We have two new undergraduates join the lab! Welcome Chris Mayhugh and Savanna Eosso!
- Tasnuva Enam presented a research proposal on metamemory at the 8th Annual Graduate Research Symposium of the Department of Educational Studies in Psychology, Research Methodology, and Counseling.
- CeCe Hessler wins multiple awards at UA's Honor's Day! Congrats!
March 2016
- We have two new undergraduates join the lab! Welcome Catherine Reynolds and Katherine Beyer!
- A new article was accepted in the journal of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin entitled, "Social-class differences in consumer choices and memory of others’ preferences in the US: The critical role of an independent vs. interdependent self-construal."
- The University of Southern Mississippi invited me to give a talk: "Retrieval expectations affect false memories."
January 2016
- Dr. McDonough is giving a talk at the Alabama Research Institute on Aging on January 27th in AIME 111 at 12pm titled, "Cognitive and brain markers for preclinical Alzheimer’s disease."
- Poster presented at the 10th Human Amyloid Imaging meeting titled, "Fluid and crystallized discrepancy in healthy adults: The relationship with beta-amyloid and cortical thickness."
- Article featured in Health Canal! Mentally Challenging Activities Key to a Healthy Aging Mind
December 2015
- We have a new undergraduate join the lab! Welcome CeCe Hessler!
November 2015
- First Mac2 lab meeting!
- We have two new undergraduates join the lab! Welcome Todd Kirk and Ben Pody!
- Study was nominated for the Best Poster Award, presented at the 56th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society:
- Festini, S. B., McDonough, I. M., & Park, D. C. (November, 2015). Busyness across the adult lifespan: The busier the better.
October 2015
- Dr. McDonough was featured in the Center for Vital Longevity newsletter.
September 2015
- The Mac2 Lab is accepting new graduate student applications! Click here to apply!
August 2015
- A new article was accepted in the journal of Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience entitled, "The Synapse project: Engagement in mentally challenging activities enhances neural efficiency."
- A new article was accepted in the journal of Acta Psychologica entitled, "Retrieval monitoring is influenced by information value: The interplay between importance and confidence on false memory."
- A new graduate student, Tasnuva Enam, joined the lab!