Institute for Creative Technologies

Research Scientist

Research Homepage

Thomas D. Parsons, PhD is a Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychologist, Assistant Research Professor, and Research Scientist at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. In addition to his patents (with eHarmony.com), he has over 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals and other fora. He directs the NeuroSim Laboratory and the VRCPAT Project--helping to facilitate human-computer interface research with adaptive virtual environments and advanced conversational virtual human agents that have been applied to medical and mental health applications.

Dr. Parsons’s work with human-computer interfaces began with invasive brain-computer interfaces in the Neurology Department at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Medical School. While there he conducted research on the frontostriatal system and the cognitive and emotional sequelae of deep brain stimulation. Dr. Parsons‘s current work focuses on the development of noninvasive brain-computer interfaces and psychophysiologically adaptive virtual environments (including virtual humans) that may be used for neuropsychological assessment, stress inoculation, virtual reality exposure therapy, cognitive training, and rehabilitation. These goals are being pursued with a combination of theoretical and experimental approaches at several levels of investigation ranging from the biophysical level to the systems level.

Dr. Parsons’s research makes use of artificial neural networks, virtual patients, and virtual/augmented environments to investigate frontal subcortical circuits that underlie neurocognitive functioning and affect regulation in persons throughout the life course. Much of this research focuses upon the frontostriatal system’s (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, lateral orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, supplementary motor area, and associated basal-ganglia structures) adaptive responses (initiation, execution, or withholding) to environmental situations, and the ways in which changes in specific frontostriatal regions involve effectively excessive release or withholding of various types of response.