About Us

The Laboratory for Integrative Lifespan Research in the University of Victoria’s Department of Psychology is a research group focusing on the study of within-person change in well-being, health and cognition across the lifespan from young adulthood to later life. Co-directed by Drs. Scott Hofer and Andrea Piccinin, the group includes postdoctoral researchers, graduate and undergraduate students with emphasis on lifespan development and aging, longitudinal data collection and analysis, and development of methods for the sensitive detection of within-person change and variation.

Key Aims of our Research:

• Identification of lifespan contextual and behavioral risk factors and health-related antecedents of cognitive change
• Implementation of intensive measurement designs to permit sensitive “prospective” identification of change from an individual’s normative performance
• Evaluation of the dimensions and determinants of within-person variation and between-person differences in well-being
• Evaluation of optimal design features (e.g., power to detect change) for longitudinal and intensive measurement designs
• Neuroscientific investigations with near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) equipment to identify brain indicators associated with behavioural performance to improve early detection of those at risk for cognitive impairment

This website has been established to facilitate volunteer participation for active aging research studies at the Laboratory for Integrative Lifespan Research and the University of Victoria. We are committed to working with the local community members as partners in our research projects and are currently focusing on building a Volunteer Research Registry of individuals both local to Victoria, BC and cross-Canada, who are interested in contributing to our studies as participants.

Drs. Hofer and Piccinin also lead the international Integrative Analysis of Longitudinal Studies on Aging (IALSA) research network for collaborative interdisciplinary and cross-national research aimed at replicating and extending research findings from a within-person perspective.