Nathan Gates, a Neuropsychology doctoral student in the CUNY Graduate Center, has been analyzing EEG/ERP data in the Psychophysiology Lab since 2003. Trying to understand mechanisms underlying attentional control in healthy and psychiatric populations, his dissertation uses a modified mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm to investigate the neurophysiological characteristics of auditory information processing. The goals are to advance existing MMN designs and methods, test hypotheses about the neurophysiology underlying cognitive deficits in depression, and examine the clinical utility of MMN as a predictor of successful treatment response. Being also interested in the interaction of emotional regulation and attentional control, he has employed an "emotional Stroop" task to study stimulus- and response-related brain activity associated with detecting a target stimulus feature (color) while ignoring task-irrelevant features (meaning) and associated emotional reactions.

gatesna@pi.cpmc.columbia.edu