James Arruda, PhD

Dr. James Arruda, professor of psychology, teaches courses in cognitive neuroscience, biological psychology, sensation and perception, research methods, and behavioral statistics.

Arruda is a research neuropsychologist whose research focuses on brain-behavior relationships, including Alzheimer's dementia, mild cognitive impairment, sustained human performance, and the validity of statistical analyses when applied to quantitative electroencephalogram data. 

For the past several years, he has been developing a biomarker for Alzheimer’s dementia.  The biomarker involves the presentation of a series of strobe flashes that evoke a timed electrophysiological response from the brain. Delayed signaling suggested that participants with mild cognitive impairment—an early stage of Alzheimer’s dementia—have compromised cholinergic functioning that resulted in impaired visual processing. Study results, published in the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, support the theory that mild cognitive impairment is an intermediate stage between normal healthy aging and the neuropathology present in Alzheimer’s disease. 

Arruda has also been working on developing a quantitative electroencephalographic measure that reliably indexes a sustained attention system in the human brain. He has published numerous articles detailing the psychometric properties of a specific quantitative electroencephalographic measure and is working to confirm the role of this measure along with cortical noradrenaline, a neurotransmitter, in the sustained attention process. This and other research can be found in the International Journal of Psychophysiology.

In addition to his research, he is an editorial board member of the Journal of Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback. Before coming to UWF in 2004, he was a faculty member of Mercer University. 

He received a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology, and doctorate in experimental psychology, all from the University of Rhode Island. He also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in neuropsychology from Brown University School of Medicine.