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Mike Freedberg

Mike Freedberg

Assistant Professor, Department of Kinesiology and Health Education
Assistant Professor, RMS

Phone: +1 512 232 6024
Email: michael.freedberg@austin.utexas.edu
Office: BEL
View Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

Michael received his undergraduate degree in Psychology from Plattsburgh State University in New York in 2010 and received his PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Iowa in 2016. His dissertation topic is titled: Examining the effects of reward and punishment on incidental learning. Michael's research at the University of Iowa involved studying learning and memory in healthy younger and older adults and patients with Parkinson's disease.

After receiving his doctorate, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. Michael's work at NINDS involved the combined use of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and fMRI to improve connectivity in targeted networks that support memory and understand interactions between memory networks.

Michael will be joining the department of Kinesiology and Health Eduction in January of 2021 as an Assistant Professor. He will continue to use rTMS and fMRI to understand the organization of the brain's memory networks, with an emphasis on developing targeted treatments to reduce memory loss in populations suffering from memory loss, such as patients with Alzheimer's disease, Traumatic Brain Injury, and older adults.

Roembke, T., Freedberg, M., Hazeltine, E. & McMurray, B. (2020). Simultaneous training on overlapping grapheme phoneme correspondences augments learning and retention. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 191(March), 104731. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2019.104731.

Freedberg, M., Reeves, J., Hussain, S., Zaghloul, K. & Wassermann, E. (2020). Identifying site-and stimulation-specific TMS-evoked EEG potentials using a quantitative cosine similarity metric. Plos one, 15(1), e0216185. doi:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0216185.

Freedberg, M., Toader, A., Wassermann, E. & Voss, J. (2019). Competitive and cooperative interactions between medial temporal and striatal learning systems. Neuropsychologia, 136(January), 107257. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2019.107257.

Freedberg, M., Reeves, J., Toader, A., Hermiller, M., Kim, E., Haubenberger, D., Cheung, Y., Voss, J. & Wassermann, E. (2019). Optimizing Hippocampal-Cortical Network Modulation via Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: A Dose?Finding Study Using the Continual Reassessment Method. Neuromodulation: Technology at the Neural Interface(October). doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/ner.13052.

Freedberg, M., Reeves, J., Toader, A., Hermiller, M., Voss, J. & Wassermann, E. (2019). Persistent enhancement of hippocampal network connectivity by parietal rTMS is reproducible. Eneuro, 6(5), ENEURO.0129–19.2019 . https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6795558/. doi:doi: 10.1523/ENEURO.0129-19.2019.

Schintu, S., Freedberg, M., Alam, Z., Shomstein, S. & Wassermann, E. (2018). Left-shifting prism adaptation boosts reward-based learning. Cortex, 109(December), 279–286. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2018.09.021.

Voss, M., Clark, R., Freedberg, M., Weng, T. & Hazeltine, E. (2018). Striking a chord with healthy aging: memory system cooperation is related to preserved configural response learning in older adults. Neurobiology of Aging, 63(March), 44–53. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2017.11.001.

Clark, R., Hazeltine, E., Freedberg, M. & Voss, M. (2018). Age differences in episodic associative learning. Psychology and aging, 33(1), 144–157. doi:https://doi.org/10.1037/pag0000234.

Freedberg, M., Schacherer, J., Chen, K., Uc, E., Narayanan, N. & Hazeltine, E. (2017). Seperating the effect of reward from correctdive feedback during learning in patients with Parkinson's disease. Cognitive, Behavioral, & Affective Neuroscience, 17, 678–695. doi:https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-017-0505-0.

Freedberg, M., Glass, B., Filoteo, J., Hazeltine, E. & Maddox, W. (2017). Comparing the effects of positive and negative feedback in information-integration category learning. Memory & Cognition, 45, 12–25. doi:https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-016-0638-3.

Freedberg, M., Schacherer, J. & Hazeltine, E. (2016). Incidental learning of rewarded associations bolsters learning on an associative task.. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42(5), 786–803. doi:https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000201.

Clark, R., Freedberg, M., Hazeltine, E. & Voss, M. (2015). Are There Age-Related Differences in the Ability to Learn Configural Responses?. Plos one, 10(8), e0137260. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0137260. doi:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0137260.

Freedberg, M., Wagschal, T. & Hazeltine, E. (2014). Incidental learning and task boundaries. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(6), 1680–1700. doi:https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000010.

Cory M Rebmann, Ph.D., expected 2025 (Supervisor)
Research interests are in the areas of memory and memory interference using rTMS and fMRI. In addition, research interests include how physical activity can reduce memory interference, bioenergetics, neurotransmitters, and how physical activity can increase cognitive abilities. His current study involves investigating if learning information involving mixed probabilities contributes to memory interference.

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