Associate Professor
416-979-5000, ext.552646
todd.girard@ryerson.ca
My research interests focus on functions mediated by the medial-temporal lobe, including primarily memory and spatial cognition. I am particularly interested in the applications of this study area and approach to understanding functional consequences of medial-temporal abnormalities in clinical conditions such as schizophrenia, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Through studies with healthy and clinical samples, my lab also hopes to inform and test theories of normal cognition. In this vein, our lab takes an applied cognitive neuroscience approach to studying human conditions via neuropsychological, cognitive-science, and neuroimaging methods. Our lab has also been exploring the effects of recreational drug use on cognition, intelligence assessment, and the spatial and temporal nature of multimodal hallucinations accompanying sleep paralysis. Some recent research questions in our lab include:
- Are functional abnormalities in the medial-temporal lobe associated with Schizophrenia and PTSD regionally specific?
- How are forms of memory and mnemonic processes differentially aberrant across the schizophrenia spectrum and among users of recreational drugs like ketamine and cannabis?
- How do emotional and self-referential thought processes contribute to memory of one’s past, future thoughts, and symptoms of psychopathology (psychosis, depression)?
I teach undergraduate courses on Human Memory, Brain and Behaviour, Psychopharmacology, Research Methods in Psychology, and The Psychology of Thinking. I also teach graduate-level courses in Human Brain Anatomy and Clinical Psychopharmacology. Through these courses I aim to enhance students’ appreciation of the brain and cognition, the role that neurochemicals play in normal daily life, as well as in addiction and mental illness, from the neural level to thought and behaviour.
