• PhD, The University of Western Ontario

Each thought that crosses your mind is carried along the network of billions of interconnected neurons that make up your brain. The manner in which those neurons are connected shapes how you think: Learning a skill can build up connections between one set of brain regions, but brain disease that disconnects a different set of brain areas can cause you to believe your mother is an imposter! I use behavioral studies, neuroimaging (fMRI) and machine learning to investigate relationships between the mind and the brain’s wiring. I focus especially on behaviors like reading that depend on communication between functionally-specialized brain regions. Recent neuroimaging studies in my lab have produced biologically plausible simulations of knowledge deficits following stroke and shown that the brain’s wiring can diagnose ADHD with almost perfect accuracy. An accidental discovery in the last year showed that the manner in which strong and poor reader’s brains organize as they learn to read can even influence how their brain carries out mental math, providing an intriguing explanation for why children with reading difficulty are more likely to also have a math disability.

• McNorgan C. (2021). The Connectivity Fingerprints of Highly-Skilled and Disordered Reading Persist Across Cognitive Domains. Frontiers in computational neuroscience, 15, 590093.
• McNorgan, C., Smith, G. J., & Edwards, E. S. (2020). Integrating functional connectivity and MVPA through a multiple constraint network analysis. Neuroimage, 208, 116412.
• McNorgan, C., Judson, C., Handzlik, D., & Holden, J. G. (2020). Linking ADHD and Behavioral Assessment Through Identification of Shared Diagnostic Task-Based Functional Connections. Frontiers in Physiology, 11.
• Lytle, M. N., McNorgan, C., & Booth, J. R. (2019). A longitudinal neuroimaging dataset on multisensory lexical processing in school-aged children. Scientific data, 6(1), 1-12.
• Randazzo, M., Greenspon, E. B., Booth, J. R., & McNorgan, C. (2019). Children with reading difficulty rely on unimodal neural processing for phonemic awareness. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 13, 390.
• Smith, G. J., Booth, J. R., & McNorgan, C. (2018). Longitudinal task-related functional connectivity changes predict reading development. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 1754.
• Edwards, E. S., Burke, K., Booth, J. R., & McNorgan, C. (2018). Dyslexia on a continuum: A complex network approach. PLoS One, 13(12), e0208923.
• McNorgan, C., & Booth, J. R. (2015). Skill dependent audiovisual integration in the fusiform induces repetition suppression. Brain and language, 141, 110-123.
• McNorgan, C., Awati, N., Desroches, A. S., & Booth, J. R. (2014). Multimodal lexical processing in auditory cortex is literacy skill dependent. Cerebral Cortex, 24(9), 2464-2475.
• McNorgan, C., & Joanisse, M. F. (2014). A connectionist approach to mapping the human connectome permits simulations of neural activity within an artificial brain. Brain connectivity, 4(1), 40-52.
• Brennan, C., Cao, F., Pedroarena‐Leal, N., McNorgan, C., & Booth, J. R. (2013). Reading acquisition reorganizes the phonological awareness network only in alphabetic writing systems. Human brain mapping, 34(12), 3354-3368.
• McNorgan, C., Randazzo-Wagner, M., & Booth, J. R. (2013). Cross-modal integration in the brain is related to phonological awareness only in typical readers, not in those with reading difficulty. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 7, 388.
• McNorgan, C. (2012). A meta-analytic review of multisensory imagery identifies the neural correlates of modality-specific and modality-general imagery. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6, 285.
• McNorgan, C., Alvarez, A., Bhullar, A., Gayda, J., & Booth, J. R. (2011). Prediction of reading skill several years later depends on age and brain region: implications for developmental models of reading. Journal of Neuroscience, 31(26), 9641-9648.
• McNorgan, C., Reid, J., & McRae, K. (2011). Integrating conceptual knowledge within and across representational modalities. Cognition, 118(2), 211-233.