Research Interests

My research interests combine neuropsychology and electrophysiological measures of brain activity to study the mechanisms underlying typical and pathological cognitive aging. During my PhD at the University of Strasbourg, I investigated cognitive processes involved in spatial navigation in typical aging. Spatial navigation refers to the ability to create and memorize a mental representation of the configuration of an environment (i.e. a cognitive map), in order to orientate and find our way within this environment. Elderly individuals often report difficulties in finding their way in novel environments. The objective of my PhD was to understand the cerebral mechanisms underlying spatial navigation decline in non-pathological aging. I compared performances of young and elderly participants at several visuo-spatial tasks, and I studied the cerebral correlates of the cognitive processes involved in these tasks using event-related potentials or EEG.

More recently, I became interested in the development of sensitive measures of cognitive impairment in pathological aging. As a post-doctoral researcher in the Face Categorization Lab and the Institute of Neuroscience (Pr. A. Ivanoiu, Cliniques Universitaire StLuc) at UCLouvain, I study encoding and recognition of faces in patients with Alzheimer’s disease using Fast Periodic Visual Stimulation (FPVS).

Publications

Lithfous S., Tromp D., Dufour A., Kemp J., Sellal F., Blanc F., Després O. Differential processing of hierarchical visual stimuli in young and older healthy adults: an ERP study. Neuropsychology, in press

Tromp D., Dufour A., Lithfous S., Pebayle T., Després O. Episodic memory in normal ageing and Alzheimer’s disease: Insights from neuroimaging and behavioral studies. Ageing Research Reviews, 2015, 24: 232-262.

Lithfous S., Tromp D., Dufour A., Pebayle T., Goutagny R., Després O. Decreased theta power at encoding predicts cognitive mapping deficits in elderly individuals during a spatial memory task. Neurobiology of Aging, 2015, 36(10): 2821-2829.

Lithfous S., Dufour A., Moessinger M., Bilz L., Sundby C., Pebayle T., Després O. Appropriate encoding strategies compensate for driving abilities in elderly individuals: a virtual reality study, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 2014, 62(9): 1795-1797

Lithfous S., Dufour A., Blanc F., Després O. Allocentric bunt not egocentric orientation is impaired in normal aging: an ERP study, Neuropsychology, 2014, 28(5):761-771

Lithfous S., Dufour A., Després O. Spatial navigation in normal aging and the prodromal stage of Alzheimer’s disease: insights from imaging and behavioral studies. Ageing Research Reviews, 2013, 12(1): 201-213.

Lecourtier L., Pereira de Vasconcelos A., Leroux E., Cosquer B., Geiger K., Lithfous S., Cassel JC. Septohippocampal pathways contribute to system consolidation of spatial memory: sequential implication of GABAergic and cholinergic neurons. Hippocampus, 2011, 21(12): 1277-1289