Benjamin Katz

About

Benjamin Katz is an Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Science at Virginia Tech. He is part of the Department of Human Development and Family Science located at 295 West Campus Drive, Blacksburg, VA. Katz is actively involved in research through the Cognitive Aging and Translational Science Laboratory and is accepting new graduate students and research team members. His research focuses on aging, with media mentions discussing topics such as aging, health, dementia, and brain health. His work contributes to the understanding of adult development and aging, particularly in the context of cognitive health and aging processes.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Medicine
• Computer Science
• Developmental psychology
• Neuroscience
• Computational biology
• Psychiatry
• Demography
• Genetics
• Biology

Selected publications

• How Do Older Adults Recruited Using MTurk Differ From Those in a National Probability Sample?

  The International Journal of Aging and Human Development · 2020 · 74 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  A growing number of studies within the field of gerontology have included samples recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online crowdsourcing portal. While some research has examined how younger adult participants recruited through other means may differ from those recruited using MTurk, little work has addressed this question with older adults specifically. In the present study, we examined how older adults recruited via MTurk might differ from those recruited via a national probab…

  DOI

• The Decline in Intrinsic Connectivity Between the Salience Network and Locus Coeruleus in Older Adults: Implications for Distractibility

  Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience · 2020 · 60 citations

  We examined functional connectivity between the locus coeruleus (LC) and the salience network in healthy young and older adults to investigate why people become more prone to distraction with age. Recent findings suggest that the LC plays an important role in focusing processing on salient or goal-relevant information from multiple incoming sensory inputs (Mather et al., 2016). We hypothesized that the connection between LC and the salience network declines in older adults, and therefore the sal…

  DOI

• Neural correlates of working memory training: Evidence for plasticity in older adults

  NeuroImage · 2020 · 39 citations

  Brain activity typically increases with increasing working memory (WM) load, regardless of age, before reaching an apparent ceiling. However, older adults exhibit greater brain activity and reach ceiling at lower loads than younger adults, possibly reflecting compensation at lower loads and dysfunction at higher loads. We hypothesized that WM training would bolster neural efficiency, such that the activation peak would shift towards higher memory loads after training. Pre-training, older adults…

  DOI

• Psychological Resilience, Cognitive Function, and Physical Activity: A Longitudinal Mediation Study

  American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry · 2025-02-03 · 7 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Longitudinal Associations Between Psychological Resilience and Cognitive Function: Evidence From the U.S. Health and Retirement Study

  The Journals of Gerontology Series B · 2024-12-13 · 7 citations

  article

  OBJECTIVES: Reductions in psychological resilience and declining cognition are common among older adults. Understanding the longitudinal association between them could be beneficial for interventions that focus on age-related cognitive and psychological health. In this study, we evaluated the longitudinal associations between cognition and psychological resilience over time in a nationally representative sample of U.S. older adults. METHODS: A total of 9,075 respondents aged 65 and above from 20…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Susanne M. Jaeggi

  Northeastern University

  15 shared

• Martin Buschkuehl

  MIND Research Institute

  14 shared

• Priti Shah

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  13 shared

• John Jonides

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  11 shared

• Joseph Niyonzima

  Impact

  8 shared

• Shifang Zhang

  Peking University

  8 shared

• Jacky Au

  7 shared

• Marrium Mansoor

  Virginia Tech

  7 shared

Labs

• Cognitive Aging and Translational Science LaboratoryPI