For Faculty:
Resources for Faculty

Faculty Membership Policy

Committees

About Faculty:
Alphabetic Faculty List

Faculty Directory

Research Interests

Search Neuroscience

Angus MacDonald, III, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology E-mail: angus@umn.edu

Research Interests:

When cognitive neuroscience, and in particular neuroimaging methods, are used to address questions about the manifestation of psychopathology in human populations, a number of methodological complications are introduced. For example, do differences in cortical activity lead to poor task performance, or does poor task performance lead to reduced cortical activity? Under what circumstances can differences in performance be interpreted as impairment in a process? To address such questions we use a number of methods, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), behavioral genetics (twin and family studies), clinical assessment and experimental psychology. Current research areas include (1) understanding how executive control mechanisms, which are associated with prefrontal cortex functioning, modulate attentional and affective processing; (2) evaluating how impairments in such mechanisms may be related to schizophrenia and the genes associated with schizophrenia; and (3) methods development for analyzing fMRI, and psychometric confounds in the measurement of group differences.

Selected Publications:

Goghari VM, Macdonald AW. Effects of Varying the Experimental Design of a Cognitive Control Paradigm on Behavioral and Functional Imaging Outcome Measures. J Cogn Neurosci. 2007 Oct 5.

Goghari VM, Rehm K, Carter CS, MacDonald AW. Sulcal thickness as a vulnerability indicator for schizophrenia. Br J Psychiatry. 2007 Sep;191:229-33.

Brambilla P, Macdonald AW 3rd, Sassi RB, Johnson MK, Mallinger AG, Carter CS, Soares JC. Context processing performance in bipolar disorder patients. Bipolar Disord. 2007 May;9(3):230-7.

MacDonald AW 3rd, Carter CS, Flory JD, Ferrell RE, Manuck SB. COMT val158Met and executive control: a test of the benefit of specific deficits to translational research. J Abnorm Psychol. 2007 May;116(2):306-12.

Goghari VM, Rehm K, Carter CS, Macdonald AW 3rd. Regionally specific cortical thinning and gray matter abnormalities in the healthy relatives of schizophrenia patients. Cereb Cortex. 2007 Feb;17(2):415-24.

MacDonald AW 3rd, Becker TM, Carter CS. Functional magnetic resonance imaging study of cognitive control in the healthy relatives of schizophrenia patients. Biol Psychiatry. 2006 Dec 1;60:1241-9.

MacDonald AW 3rd, Chafee MV. Translational and developmental perspective on N-methyl-D-aspartate synaptic deficits in schizophrenia. Dev Psychopathol. 2006 Summer;18(3):853-76.

Snitz BE, Macdonald AW 3rd, Carter CS. Cognitive deficits in unaffected first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients: a meta-analytic review of putative endophenotypes. Schizophr Bull. 2006 Jan;32(1):179-94.