Jessica Church-Lang

Dr. Church-Lang received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Washington University in St. Louis in 2008. She has a strong interest in how cognitive processes develop over age, and in how research on atypical development illuminates the vulnerable aspects of typical cognitive development. Research in the lab currently focuses on the development of cognitive skills such as task switching and reading in late childhood and early adolescence. Dr. Church-Lang is heading the neuroimaging arm of the Meadows and Vaughn Gross Center project on 4th grade reading intervention at UT Austin. We are interested in whether neuroimaging can reveal differences between struggling readers who respond to intervention and those who don't, as well as in exploring differences between struggling and non-struggling readers during sentence comprehension. We're particularly interested in how regions of the brain involved in attention relate to reading disorders.  As part of the reading-intervention project, as well as in other research efforts, we are exploring the development of short-duration, rapidly-adjusting adaptive control brain networks, how they might be different in typical and atypical development, and how they interact over age with the rest of the brain. To address these questions, we use behavioral methods such as cognitive tests (where we measure reaction times, accuracy on tasks, or eye movements), neuropsychological assessments, neuroimaging (fMRI, resting-state fcMRI), and studies of patient populations (e.g. children with Tourette syndrome or dyslexia).

Selected Representative Publications

Church JA, Balota DA, Petersen SE, Schlaggar BL. Manipulation of length and lexicality localizes the functional neuroanatomy of phonological processing in adult readers. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 2011. 23(6): 1475-1493. 

Church JA, Petersen SE, Schlaggar BL. The Task B problem and other issues in developmental functional neuroimaging. Human Brain Mapping. 2010. 31(6): 852-862.

Church JA, Wenger KK, Dosenbach NU, Miezin FM, Petersen SE, Schlaggar BL. Task control signals in pediatric Tourette syndrome show evidence of immature and anomalous functional activity. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2009. 3:38. 

Schlaggar BL, Church JA. 2009. Functional neuroimaging insights into the development of skilled reading. Curr Dir in Psych Sci 2009. 18(1): 21-26.   

Ihnen SK, Church JA, Petersen SE, Schlaggar BL. Lack of generalizability of sex differences in the fMRI BOLD activity associated with language processing in adults. NeuroImage. 2009. 45(3): 1020-32. Epub 2008 Dec 30.

Church JA, Fair DA, Dosenbach NUF, Cohen AL, Miezin FM, Petersen SE, Schlaggar BL. Control networks in pediatric Tourette Syndrome show immature and anomalous patterns of functional connectivity. Brain 2009. 132(1): 225-38. Epub 2008 Oct 24.

Church JA, Coalson RS, Lugar HM, Petersen SE, Schlaggar BL. A developmental fMRI study of reading and repetition reveals changes in phonological and visual mechanisms over age.Cerebral Cortex, 2008. 18(9): 2054-65.  Epub Jan 31