Rebecca Todd

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PhD Developmental Science and Neuroscience

Current Postdoctoral Fellow  

University of Toronto

Attention and Emotion

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My doctoral work focused on mapping neural activation patterns underlying affective processing as well as cognition/emotion interactions associated with individual differences and normative development of self-regulation in childhood. Research interests include investigating the effects of emotional arousal on the subjective experience of perceptual vividness and its link with memory vividness in healthy young adults as well as in populations who experienced a traumatic life event. I am also currently investigating the influence of post-encoding arousal (when emotional arousal is induced after an affectively neutral event) on neural processes associated with episodic memory, and the influence of genetic variation on neural activation patterns linked to specific aspects of attention and memory for emotionally salient events.  

  • Niu, Y., Todd, R. M., & Anderson A.K. (in press). Affective salience can reverse the effects of stimulus-driven salience on eye movements in complex scenes. Frontiers in Emotion Science.
  • Todd, R. M., Talmi, D., Schmitz, T., Susskind, J., & Anderson, A. K. (2012). Psychophysical and neural evidence for emotion enhanced perceptual vividness, Journal of Neuroscience.
  • Niu, Y., Todd, R. M., Kyan, M., & Anderson A.K. (2012). Visual saliency and emotional salience influence eye movements. ACM Transactions on Applied Perception.
  • Todd, R. M., Cunningham, W. A., Anderson, A. K., & Thompson, E. (2012). Affect-biased attention as emotion regulation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16 (7), 365-372
  • Todd, R. M. & Anderson, A. K. (in press). Salience, state, and expression: The influence of specific aspects of emotion on attention. In K. Ochsner and S.M. Kosslyn (Eds.) Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Neuroscience. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Todd, R. M., Palombo, D., Levine, B., Anderson, A. K. (2011). Genetic differences in emotionally enhanced memory, Neuropsychologia, 49(4), 734-744.
  • Todd, R. M., Evans, J. W., Morris, D., Lewis, M. D., & Taylor, M. J. (2010). The changing face of emotion: Age related patterns of amygdala activation to salient faces. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsq007
  • Evans, J. M., Todd, R. M., Taylor, M. J., & Strother, S. C. (2010) Group specific optimisation of fMRI processing steps for child and adult data. NeuroImage.
  • Lahat, A., Todd, R. M., Mahy, C. E. V., Lau, K., & Zelazo, P. D. (2010). Neurophysiological correlates of executive function: A comparison of European Canadian and Chinese Canadian preschool children.  Frontiers of Human Neuroscience. 3:72. doi:10.3389/neuro.09.072.2009
  • Todd, R. M. & Anderson, A. K. (2009). Through the lens of emotion: Emotionality, arousal and attention in the amygdala. In E. Balcetis and G. D. Lassiter (Eds.), The social psychology of sight. Psychology Press.
  • Todd, R. M. & Anderson, A. K. (2009). The neurogenetics of remembering emotions past.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 106 (45): 18881-18882.
  • Todd, R. M. & Anderson, A. K. (2009). Six degrees of separation: The amygdala regulates social distance. Nature Neuroscience, 12 (10), 1-3.
  • Todd, R. M., Lewis, M. D., Meusel, L.-A., & Zelazo, P. D. (2008). The time course of social-emotional processing in early childhood: ERP responses to facial affect and familiarity in a Go-Nogo task. Neuropsychologia, 46, 595-613.
  • Todd, R. M. & Lewis, M. D. (2008). Self-regulation in the developing brain. In J. Reed & J. W. Rogers (Eds.), Child Neuropsychology: Concepts, theory and practice. London, UK: Blackwell.
  • Lewis, M. D., Granic, I., Lamm, C., Stieben, J., Todd, R. M., Maodab, I., & Pepler, D. (2008). Changes in the neural bases of emotion regulation associated with clinical improvement in children with behavior problems. Development and Psychopathology, 20, 913-939.
  • Lewis, M. D. & Todd, R. M. (2007). The self-regulating brain: Cortical-subcortical feedback and the development of intelligent action. Cognitive Development, 22, 406-430.
  • Lewis, M. D., Todd R. M., & Honsberger, M. (2007). ERP measures of emotion regulation in early childhood. NeuroReport, 18, 61-65.
  • Zelazo, P., Gao, H., & Todd, R. M. (2007). The development of consciousness in childhood. In P. Zelazo, M. Moscovitch, & E. Thompson (Eds.), Cambridge companion to consciousness (pp. 405-435). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.