Effective 2002 Lars Bäckman holds a professorship at the Aging Research Center, Karolinska Institutet. Lars is af Jochnick professor in the cognitive neuroscience of aging since 2011. This post is based on a donation from the af Jochnick Foundation of 50 million Swedish kronor over a 10-year period. He has previously held professorships at Gothenburg University (1993-1998) and Uppsala University (1998-2002). Lars is a cognitive psychologist by training and received his Ph.D. from the University of Umeå in 1984. He has supervised 15 graduate students who have completed their dissertation work and 11 post-doctoral fellows.

Since 1984 Lars has regularly received funding as principal investigator from one or more of the major research councils in Sweden. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (chairperson in Class IX [Social Sciences] 2010-2012) and the European Academy of Sciences, and received the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in 2008. His scientific work has resulted in 277 articles in peer-reviewed journals, 7 edited volumes, and 62 book chapters.

Lars has served on numerous boards and committees including the Swedish Council for Social Research, the Swedish Sports Research Council, and the Swedish Research Council, where he chaired the priority committee for psychology between 2001-2006. He has been a member of the editorial board for several journals within gerontology, rehabilitation, and general psychology.

His primary research area is cognition in normal and pathological aging, with special focus on memory and the research activities range from large-scale epidemiological studies to experimental brain-imaging work. A major finding in the cognitive-epidemiological research is that people who will go on to develop Alzheimer’s disease or vascular dementia show deficits in episodic memory, speed, and executive functions several years prior to clinical diagnosis. Intervention studies demonstrate that systematic training of memory and attention results in clear performance benefits and accompanying brain changes among older adults, although the size of improvement is typically reduced relative to younger adults.

In the fMRI work, a recurrent observation is that older adults underactivate task-relevant brain regions during episodic and working memory. PET studies demonstrate marked losses in dopamine functions from early to late adulthood. These losses have been successfully linked to age-related cognitive deficits. In ongoing work, fMRI and PET are integrated to elucidate the chain that progresses from neuromodulation through functional brain activation to cognitive performance across the life span.

Dahlin, E., Stigsdotter-Neely, A., Larsson, A., Bäckman, L., & Nyberg, L. (2008). Transfer of learning after updating training mediated by the striatum. Science, 320, 1510-1512.

Karlsson, S., Nyberg, L., Karlsson, P., Fischer, H., Thilers, P., MacDonald, S. W. S., Brehmer, Y., Rieckmann, A., Halldin, C., Farde, L., & Bäckman, L. (2009). Modulation of striatal dopamine D1 binding by cognitive processing. Neuroimage, 48, 398-404.

Bäckman, L., Lindenberger, U., Li, S.-C., & Nyberg, L. (2010). Linking cognitive aging to alterations in dopaminergic neurotransmitter functioning: Recent data and future avenues. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 34, 670-677.

Fischer, H., Nyberg, L., Karlsson, S., Karlsson, P., Brehmer, Y., Rieckmann, A., MacDonald, S. W. M., Farde, L., & Bäckman, L. (2010). Simulating neurocognitive aging: Effects of a dopaminergic antagonist on brain activity during working memory. Biological Psychiatry, 67, 575-580.

Li, S.-C., Chicherio, C., Nyberg, L., von Oertzen, T., Nagel, I. E., Sander, T., Heekeren, H. R., Lindenberger, U., & Bäckman, L. (2010). Ebbinghaus revisited: Influences of the BDNF Val66Met polymorphism on backward serial recall are modulated by human aging. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22, 2164-2173.

Bäckman, L., Karlsson, S., Fischer, H., Karlsson, P., Brehmer, Y., Rieckmann, A., MacDonald, S. W. S., Farde, L., & Nyberg, L. (2011). Dopamine D1 receptors and age differences in brain activation during working memory. Neurobiology of Aging, 32, 1849-1856.

Bäckman, L., Nyberg, L., Soveri, A., Johansson, J., Andersson, M., Dahlin, E., Neely, A. S., Virta, J., Laine, M., & Rinne, J. O. (2011). Effects of working-memory training on striatal dopamine release. Science, 333, 718.

Lövdén, M., Schaefer, S., Noack, H., Kanowski, M., Tempelmann, C., Bodammer, N., Kühn, S., Heinze, H. J., Lindenberger, U., Düzel, E., & Bäckman L. (2011). Performance-related increases in hippocampal N-acetylaspartate (NAA) induced by spatial navigation are restricted to BDNF Val homozygotes. Cerebral Cortex, 21, 1435-1442.

Rieckmann, A., Karlsson, S., Karlsson, P., Brehmer, Y., Fischer, H., Farde, L., Nyberg, L., & Bäckman, L. (2011). Dopamine D1 receptor associations within and between dopaminergic pathways in younger and elderly adults: Links to cognitive performance. Cerebral Cortex, 21, 2023-2032.

Thorvaldsson, V., MacDonald, S. W. S., Fratiglioni, L., Winblad, B., Kivipelto, M., Jonsson Laukka, E., Skoog, I., Sacuiu, S., Guo, X., Östling, S., Börjesson-Hansson, A., Gustafson, D., Johansson, B., & Bäckman, L. (2011). Onset and rate of cognitive change before dementia diagnosis: Findings from two Swedish population-based longitudinal studies. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 17, 154-162.