Aiden Payne, Ph.D.
Aiden Payne, Ph.D., is a new Assistant Professor who joined Ohio University in 2025. He completed his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University (2019), followed by a F32 Research Fellowship in Clinical and Developmental Psychology at Florida State University.
His prior research has focused on sensorimotor control of standing balance across the healthy and impaired human lifespan, ranging from children with clinical anxiety disorders to older adults with Parkinson’s disease or a history of stroke.
His methods combine clinical measures of cognitive, emotional, and motor function with experimental investigations of reactive balance recovery behavior (combining EMG, EEG, kinematics, kinetics, and neuromechanical modeling) to investigate the causes and consequences of shifting from automatic to cognitively-engaged balance control.
Building on this prior work, he plans to develop rehabilitation protocols to restore the function of brainstem sensorimotor circuits for automatic (involuntary) balance control in older adults to improve balance while reducing maladaptive reliance on cognitive and emotional engagement for balance control, thereby freeing up cognitive and emotional control for engagement, enjoyment, and participation in more fulfilling aspects of daily life.
Select publications:
• AM Payne, JA Palmer, JL McKay, and LH Ting (2021) Lower cognitive set shifting ability is associated with stiffer balance recovery behavior and larger perturbation-evoked cortical responses in older adults. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience. DOI: 10.3389/fnagi.2021.742243
• S Boebinger, AM Payne, G Martino, K Kerr, J Mirdamadi, JL McKay, MR Borich, LH Ting (2024). Precise cortical contributions to feedback sensorimotor control during reactive balance. PLoS Computational. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011562
• JL Mirdamadi, A Poorman, G Munter, K Jones, LH Ting, MR Borich, and AM Payne (2025) Excellent test-retest reliability of perturbation-evoked cortical responses supports the feasibility of the balance N1 as a clinical biomarker. Journal of Neurophysiology. DOI: 10.1152/jn.00583.2024
• AM Payne, NB Schmidt, A Meyer, and G Hajcak (2024) The balance N1 is larger in anxious children and associated with the error-related negativity. Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Sciences. DOI: 10.1016/j.bpsgos.2024.100393
• S Boebinger, AM Payne, J Xiao, G Martino, MR Borich, JL McKay, LH Ting (2026). Cortically-mediated muscle responses to balance perturbations increase with perturbation magnitude in older adults with and without Parkinson’s disease. eNeuro. DOI: 10.1523/ENEURO.0423-25.2026
Complete list of publications:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/aiden.payne.1/bibliography/public/