Nathan Beu

Nathan Beu

School of Psychology

Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences

I am a methodologist, theoretician, cognitive neuroscientist, and experimental psychologist in the Cognitive Neural Sciences Lab of the School of Psychology and the Cognition, Ageing, and Neurodegenerative Disease laboratory in the School of Biomedicine. I am currently working on a project investigating the nature of Parkinson's disease and Traumatic Brain Injuries, and the utility of genomic and cognitive information to better predict, diagnose, and treat them, and on a project that maps latent structure of cognitive and motor abilities across the lifespan and the genetic involvement in their developmental processes and changes in later life.

I am interested in the neurobiological substrate of the psychological mechanisms involved in higher-order cognition, intelligence, and motor control (particularly the neurogenetics and frontal cortico-basal ganglia pathways involved in their concatenation). To do this, I take a model-based systems neuroscience approach, testing theoretical neural networks that might support these functions using converging evidence from traditional individual differences methods, computational and mathematical models, genotyping, EEG and other imaging methods, neurostimulation techniques, and behavioural testing. The purpose of this approach is to generate causal accounts of disturbances to, and lifespan fluctuations in, various cognitive and executive abilities required for goal-directed, adaptive behaviour.

The cognitive mechanisms that I target are those affected by psychiatric dysfunction, pathological degeneration, and ageing processes, such as response inhibition and cognitive control. My work primarily concentrates on reaction and response time and how they vary and fluctuate under different conditions, circumstances, and cognitive demands.

In addition to this, I am interested in identifying whether these mechanisms can be separated into discrete processes and how they concatenate using decomposition models of evidence accumulation. These models allow us to capture the distinct cognitive, neural, and motor processes involved in a single decision or a single response. In our lab, we develop, program, and validate novel conceptually, theoretically, and methodologically robust tasks that allow us to measure these processes individually and identify their utility, sensitivity, and specificity as markers of cognitive decline. We test existing models that yield parameters representing underlying cognitive processes that capture the dynamics of decisions, responses, and cognitive states, and map them onto imaging (EEG, MRI) and genetic information.

Using these approaches, dysfunction, disease, and degeneration can plausibly be detected using cognitive and behavioural assessments many years before other symptoms, such as psychomotor symptoms and memory impairments, manifest.

More broadly, my work has four themes: (1) the psychonomics and psychometrics of the individual differences in intelligence and various cognitive processes; (2) the underlying philosophies of experimental cognitive science and statistical inference, and the social impacts, influences, and implications of such work; (3) investigating potential targets for pharmaceutical, nutritional, technological, psychological, and physical interventions to enhance cognitive and motor functions in healthy individuals, and to offset the decline associated with disease states and ageing; and, (4) constructing formal models of pathology based on behavioural and cognitive assessment to improve the precision of medical diagnostics.

Central to my research, teaching, and supervision is my dedication to justice, equity, and ensuring access, representation, and diversity in both education and science. I am committed to improving the quality of science by promoting reproducible and open practices, principles I instantiate by sharing research code and data, preregistering study protocols, and supporting independent replication efforts, and through which, I aim to contribute to a more transparent, reliable, and equitable scientific community.

Cognitive Neural Sciences Laboratory  CNS Lab logo

In the Cognitive Neural Sciences Lab with Dr Irina Baetu, Prof Nicholas Burns, Lauren Heidenreich, Salvatore Russo, and Brittany Child, we are broadly interested in cognition and emotion and their neural underpinnings. We investigate how we learn from our experiences and how this learning guides our choices, as well as how we are able to exert cognitive control. These abilities are critical to our everyday functioning since making optimal decisions based on past experience ensures that we maximise positive outcomes and minimise aversive consequences. We study how these abilities change during ageing and in Parkinson’s disease. We are especially interested in discovering genetic variation that may help us preserve these abilities, as this might help the development of new treatments for cognitive decline. To do this, we are particularly interested in computational modelling and the neurogenetics of the basal ganglia.

We collaborate with:

Dr Lyndsey Collins-Praino

A/Prof Ahmed Moustafa

A/Prof Sarah Cohen-Woods

Dr Oren Griffiths

Level 4 (Honours)

Research Project & Thesis Assessor (2021 - Ongoing)

Level 3

Doing Research in Psychology: Advanced (2024 - Ongoing)

Individual Differences, Personality, and Assessment (2017 - 2020)

Learning and Behaviour (2016 - 2018)

Health and Lifespan Development Psychology (2016)

Level 2

Doing Research in Psychology (2019)

Foundations of Health and Lifespan Development Psychology (2016)

Foundations of Perception and Cognition (2019)

Level 1

Psychology 1A (2016 - 2020)

  • Committee Memberships
    Date Role Committee Institution Country
    2017 - 2019 Director Adelaide Postgraduate Student Association University of Adelaide Australia
    2017 - 2019 Board Member Health Sciences Postgraduate Association University of Adelaide Australia
    2015 - 2019 Representative School Committee University of Adelaide Australia

  • Memberships
    Date Role Membership Country
    2018 - ongoing Member Behavior Genetics Association United States
    2017 - ongoing Member Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society Australia
    2017 - ongoing Co-Chair Brain and Cognition Group Australia
    2017 - ongoing Member EEG Club Australia

  • Presentation
    Date Topic Presented at Institution Country
    2018 - 2018 Age moderates the genetic effect of why we make simple errors and how we correct them The Laboratory of Neural Computation and Cognition Carney Institute for Brain Science, Brown University United States
    2018 - 2018 Limitations and new directions for investigating response inhibition The Laboratory of Neural Computation and Cognition Carney Institute for Brain Science, Brown University United States
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