Become a Research Subject

You can help in the research efforts of understanding memory and memory disorders by becoming a research subject!

 

How can you help us?

Patients with Frontotemporal Dimentia

FTD is less common than Alzheimer's Disease. If you have received a clinical diagnosis of FTD and are interested in becoming involved in research, please contact us (dmccoy@temple.edu). We will try to get you involved with studies that we are conducting if you live in the Philadelphia area, or we can put you in contact with researchers in your area. Studies typically involve three or four hours of memory assessment and you are paid for your time.

Patients with Amnesia

True anterograde amnesia (not related to Alzheimer's Disease) is rare. This is especially true for developmental amnesia. If you believe that you are amnesic and are interested in becoming involved in research, please contact us (dmccoy@temple.edu). We will try to get you involved with studies that we are conducting if you live in the Philadelphia area, or we can put you in contact with researchers in your area. Studies typically involve three or four hours of memory assessment.

Healthy Volunteers

We are looking for healthy subjects to use as controls in ours studies. If you are interested you may be qualified to participate in a computer-based study of memory. To participate you must:

Be between the ages of 35-75

Be free of psychiatric and neurological disorders

Free of drug abuse

Have good vision and normal color vision

If you meet these qualifications and would like to become a subject please contact dmccoy@temple.edu. Most experiments take between 1-2 hours. The pay is 15 dollars per hour and you are compensated for your travel expenses.

What does testing involve?

Our control subjects typically come in for 1-2 hours for a computer based memory experiment. Participants usually take a series of experiments that test them on there ability to remember visual-audio pairing, episodic stories, objects from different categories, colors, shapes, and faces.

 

fMRI Brain Imaging Studies

fMRI Brain imaging is conducted at the University of Pennsylvania's Medical Center and Temple University Hospital. fMRI's use magnetic fields to measure the hemodynamic responses in the brain and develops 3-dimensional images of brain activity. The procedure is completely non-invasive and does not use radiation. Our lab uses fMRI data to analyze brain activity during certain memory tasks including long-term memory, short-term memoy, and memory of different objects.