Dr. Wheaton is a neuroscientist interested in how the brain controls arm movements, with the goals of better understanding what goes wrong after stroke and of improving adaptation to prosthetics. In addition to his research, Dr. Wheaton was elected to the City Council of Smyrna, GA, in 2019.

Dr. Wheaton earned his undergraduate degree from Radford University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. He completed his postdoctoral training at the Baltimore Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He has been a professor at Georgia Tech since 2008 and affiliated with Emory as well since 2011.

Our ability to perform repetitive tasks is known to involve both conscious and unconscious learning, and is one of the things that declines with aging and after stroke. However, how the conscious and unconscious processes interact with each other at baseline is not well understood.

In a 2017 study, Dr. Wheaton’s lab recruited healthy individuals to perform a simple task: they were given a remote control with 4 buttons and shown four white boxes on a computer screen. Each time one of the boxes turned red, they were supposed to push the button on the remote that corresponded to that box. The participants were not told that the sequence of red boxes was repeating. In the first part of the study, the researchers wanted to know if they could tell who figured out the pattern based on whether or not they got faster at pushing the right button over time. This turned out to be a reliable indicator: people who were able to tell the researchers what the pattern was at the end of the experiment also improved their response times during the experiment, while those that didn’t figure out the pattern also didn’t get faster.

In the second part of the study, the researchers wanted to know what changes in brain activity happened when the participants figured out the pattern. So they hooked the participants up to an EEG during the button-pushing experiment, and looked for changes that happened around the time that the participants got faster at responding. They found a consistent series of activations across regions in the frontoparietal region of the brain in participants who noticed the pattern, but not in participants who didn’t. The researchers think this EEG pattern may be the result of a shift from relying on visual stimuli (i.e. watching the boxes on the screen) to relying on an internal stimulus (i.e. knowledge of the pattern).