Why do some individuals acquire the complex abilities of fluid reasoning or rule-based systems like language with great ease, while others struggle? The core of my research program has been to understand how learning occurs for both children and adults who are proficient at learning, and why others struggle and fail. Critical to understanding the success or failure at learning is unraveling how our biology interacts with the environmental input to create the conditions learning. To that end, my research focuses on both the cognitive and the neurobiological substrates of learning and learning difficulties, their developmental trajectories, and more recently, the role of genetic polymorphisms on learning and cognition. More succinctly, my research aims to determine a) how differences in achievement and disability are reflected in systematic changes in our biology and b) how experience and instruction alter the dynamics in the biology to produce plasticity and remediation of early difficulties. From school-based and cross-sectional paradigms to adult training tasks, my work combines innovative and complex methodologies in functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and event-related potentials (ERP) with developmental and behavioral research. My research pursuits are motivated by pragmatic issues with respect to basic learning, as well as the diagnosis and treatment of learning disorders and neuropathology.
Donald J. Bolger is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology. He received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh and was trained as a post-doctoral fellow in Neuroscience at Northwestern University. The main focus of Dr. Bolger’s research is studying how the brain learns to read and what are the cognitive and neural bases of reading and language ability and disability. The core of his research focus is on these key issues of reading from neurobiological, cognitive, developmental and educational perspectives. Dr. Bolger’s work combines innovative and complex methodologies including MRI, event-related potentials (ERP), magnetoencephalography (MEG), with behavioral and classroom based studies to understand development and learning.