Craig McDonald

Craig McDonald

Craig McDonald

Associate Professor

Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience: Cognitive control, action monitoring, error monitoring, attention

My lab investigates the neural underpinnings of action monitoring, a cognitive process that facilitates adaptive behavior by enabling evaluation of actions and action outcomes, including errors. A current focus is on how action monitoring processes within medial frontal cortex influence cognitive and behavioral adjustments when we experience conflict or make an error. My research primarily utilizes electroencephalography (EEG). Event-related potentials (ERPs) and time-frequency analyses of rhythmic brain activity are used to provide complementary windows into the dynamic cortical activity underlying cognitive control.

https://cbn.gmu.edu/research/cbn-research-groups/mcdonald-lab

Selected Publications

Beatty PJ, Buzzell GA, Roberts DM, Voloshyna Y, McDonald CG (2021) Subthreshold error corrections predict adaptive post-error compensations. Psychophysiology 58 (6), e13803

Beatty PJ, Buzzell GA, Roberts DM & McDonald CG (2020) Contrasting time and frequency domains: ERN and induced theta oscillations differentially predict post-error behavior. Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience 12: 636-647.

Beatty PJ, Buzzell GA, Roberts DM & McDonald CG (2018) Speeded response errors and the error-related negativity modulate early sensory processing. NeuroImage 183: 112-120.

Buzzell GA, Beatty PJ, Paquette NA, Roberts DM & McDonald CG (2017) Error-induced blindness: error detection leads to impaired sensory processing and reduced accuracy at short response-stimulus intervals. Journal of Neuroscience 37(11): 2895-2903.

Roberts DM, Fedota JR, Buzzell GA, Parasuraman R & McDonald CG (2014) Prestimulus oscillations in the alpha band of the EEG are modulated by the difficulty of feature discrimination and predict activation of a sensory discrimination process. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 26(8): 1615-1628.

 

 

Courses Taught

PSYC 372  Biopsychology

PSYC 375  Brain and Sensory Processes

PSYC 592  Cognitive Electrophysiology

PSYC 701  Cognitive Bases of Behavior

Dissertations Supervised

Laura R. Rabbitt, Encoding Strategies, Hemifields, and Shape Complexity, Oh My! An Investigation of Methods to Improve Memory Performance (2024)

W. Ryan McGarry, The Effect of Distractor Processing on the Distribution of Visual Attention (2023)

Ali Momen, Robots are Perceptually Dehumanized Due to their Machine-like Appearance and Machine-like Nature (2021)

Paul J. Beatty, “Oops, I Did it Again?” Behavioral and Electrophysiological Indices of Error Processing Predict Adaptive Post-Error Compensations (2021)

George Buzzell, My Own Worst Enemy: Monitoring for Errors or Processing Feedback Can Lead to Impaired Performance When Inter-Trial-Intervals Are Short (2016)