People with personality traits such as conscientiousness, extraversion and positive affect are less likely to be diagnosed with dementia than those with neuroticism and negative affect, according to a new analysis by researchers at the University of California, Davis and Northwestern University.

Funded by a three-year $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Distinguished Professor George R. Mangun, director of the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain, is launching a project to better understand the cognitive mechanisms behind realistic voluntary attention, or attention directed by an individual’s free will. The project will be conducted in collaboration with engineering colleagues at the University of Florida.

A program that gets students into labs as early as their first year at UC Davis transforms lives — leading many to pursue careers in research. Accelerating Success by Providing Intensive Research Experience, or ASPIRE, has begun reaching out to a wider pool of students. “We wanted to find the students who, given this opportunity, would go the farthest relative to where they started,” says co-founder Steve Luck, Distinguished Professor of Psychology.