7 minute read
Phishing for Answers
by UF_CLAS
By Brian Smith
Psychologist Natalie Ebner works to unlock the secrets of the aging human brain
The human brain may be one of the most complex and enigmatic objects in the universe, and researchers around the world have spent centuries trying to understand exactly how it functions.
At the University of Florida, Trish Calvert Ring Endowed Professor of Psychology Natalie Ebner is leading the way in brain aging research, trying to understand how our brain develops and changes as we get older. As the head of the Social Cognitive and Affective Development Lab, she has been involved in dozens of research projects with the goal of understanding healthy aging, a pursuit that has led her to work with researchers from many different professional backgrounds across campus, as well as outside of the university and around the world.
“Given the complexity and multifacetedness of the phenomena we study, we work highly collaboratively in my lab,” she said, “and over the years I’ve worked here at UF, I have collaborated with computer science and security experts, epidemiologists, neuroscientists, engineers, medical scientists, and even elder law experts.”
Ebner has contributed significantly to the UF research community, as shown by the number of publications she and her trainees have authored and the media attention her lab has received in just the past few years. In February 2024, for example, she and her team from UF, along with collaborators from the University of Central Florida and the University of Arizona, published their latest report in a long line of studies looking into decision making in the context of online scam vulnerability among elderly people.
Using a highly innovative, ecologically valid approach that allows for capturing scam vulnerability in real life among older adults, she and her team measured susceptibility to email phishing. Phishing is one of the most common types of scams online and can involve links embedded in emails designed to steal user data or compromise a computer when clicked. These are extremely effective, as their sophistication can make them easy to fall for. With just one click, someone can steal login info for email and even bank accounts, or place malicious software on a computer and an entire network.
To test this, Ebner’s study had participants sign up via email, and then using that information, her team sent out phishing emails and measured click rates. Of course, these links were completely harmless, as the study was approved by the university ethics board, and the participants were fully debriefed afterwards.
Ebner’s study importantly found that across all age groups, people were more likely to fall for these scams than not, but even more so for the older demographic and especially those older adults with neurocognitive impairments and heightened genetic risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. These results suggest that as we age and our thinking, decision-making, and brain capacities decline, we are more likely to fall for deception and scams.
“We also found that mood can affect phishing susceptibility as well,” Ebner explained. “So, if you are in a good or a bad mood can impact how you process the information in front of you and affect your decision making.”
The Art Of Deception
The next step in Ebner’s deception work is to look at deep fake detection, a successor to her projects on fake news and online scams. Deep fakes are a relatively new technology where a person’s face can be digitally replaced with another, and if done correctly it can look completely seamless. Like fake news, this technology already leads to a deluge of misinformation and influences social engineering.
To fight this threat, it is important that we learn to distinguish between real and doctored digital content and understand processes in the brain that facilitate this differentiation. Ebner’s research so far has shown that everyone struggles to identify deep fakes to some degree, which isn’t too surprising considering they’re designed to be hard to detect, but here again, older adults tend to struggle more. This could be for several reasons, like an unfamiliarity with the technology or age-related changes in information processing, and Ebner hopes that her research can find the root cause, help raise awareness of the issue, and most importantly train the brain to overcome difficulties and optimize decision making.
“One of the biggest problems with this kind of work is how quickly deception techniques move online,” Ebner said. “By the time we figure one out, there’s already a new one out there.”
Ebner’s research on deceptionrelated decision making also reaches out into marginalized communities and their specific vulnerability. To this end, together with her long-term colleague Nichole Lighthall, associate professor of psychology at UCF, she has been bringing members of the Black and Hispanic communities in Orlando to Gainesville to undergo brain imaging to shine light on brain aging and potential intervention targets to reduce victimization among these underrepresented groups.
The Love Hormone
While the deception studies are a big part of her work, it is just one of three main pillars in Ebner’s research agenda. The second main pillar of Ebner’s research is oxytocin, a neuropeptide often called the “love hormone.” It plays various roles in the body, most prominently in social bonding, attachment, and childbirth. More recently, however, oxytocin has been implicated in social cognition — the capacity to process socially relevant information around us — and in this context, is particularly relevant in aging given declines, for example, in remembering faces and picking up on subtle social cues in other people.
Over the course of several weeks, participants in her studies would be administered the oxytocin compound intranasally, which has good tolerability and was shown safe when used in prescribed frequency and dosage. Participants are then asked to perform a series of tasks to test effects of the oxytocin intervention on their mental acuity, social function, and feeling states. Researchers found that oxytocin improved the ability to process faces and understand one’s own feelings; it also facilitated communication in regions of the brain known to be crucial for social cognition. These benefits were especially observed in older men, which may be a result of their already lower levels of the neuropeptide and their greater challenges with such abilities at baseline, which would give them more room for improvement from the oxytocin treatment. Currently, together with two colleagues at UF, Meredith Berry, assistant professor with the Department of Health Education and Behavior, and Yenisel Cruz-Almeida, associate professor and associate director with the Pain Research & Intervention Center of Excellence, Ebner also tests oxytocin’s effect among older adults with chronic pain and in the context of drug addiction, with promising initial findings supporting the neuropeptide’s therapeutic potential.
Training The Brain
The third pillar of Ebner’s work revolves around real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging neurofeedback to train willful brain activation, which fights cognitive decline in aging. Her lab is one of few to have established this brain-based learning technique among older adults, including those at particular risk for neurodegenerative disease. This technique constitutes a non-invasive approach to train the brain to use its full potential when performing a task. In this research, participants are connected to a brain imaging machine that, for example, shows a visual thermometer reflecting their real time brain activation in a particular region. Over the course of the neurofeedback training, particpants are then asked to try to increase their brain activity in this region on their own. If they are successful, the thermometer rises, providing the “online” feedback of their brain training success. Initial results recently published by Ebner’s group show that older adults can learn this skill and by using it can enhance performance in cognitive tasks.
“Some people have a harder time training than others, and some can’t be trained at all,” Ebner explained, but these studies show that, like any other muscle, it is possible to give our brains a workout in order to help maintain or improve our cognition. These findings, published together with Tian Lin, a research scientist and co-director in her lab, provide crucial documentation of the aging brain’s potential for functional plasticity, offering a promising future direction into brain training and intervention to advancing cognitive aging and brain health.
