Joan Swearer, PhD

Joan Swearer, PhD, ABPP-ABCN, professor of neurology and psychiatry is a clinical neuropsychologist who provides comprehensive evaluations of cognitive functions, mood and behavior, and functional status, information important in making decisions about diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of disorders known to impact the central nervous system (CNS). Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota she completed a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and in the Visual Arts at Macalester College, St. Paul, MN before moving to New York for a Master's Degree in Psychology, and a PhD in Experimental Psychology at the New School for Social Research. Dr. Swearer also completed pre-and post-neuropsychology doctoral training at UMass Chan Medical Center in Worcester, MA. Dr. Swearer’s shared interests in psychology, visual perception, and the visual arts began in her teens, “I went on to get a double major in psychology and visual art in college, where I met my husband who has been sculpting since age 11. My graduate degree was in experimental psychology and my dissertation was on the psychophysical differences between the perception of form and the perception of spatial relationships. I have been a research and then clinical neuropsychologist since graduate school.”  

Dr. Swearer’s research pursuits have led to learning about brain-behavior relationships and their effects. She joined UMass Medical School in August 1985 and has supported the Department of Neurology for 39 years. Dr. Swearer joined UMass as a member of the UMass Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center’s interdisciplinary team of neurologists, neuropsychologists, neuropathologists, and research personnel where service was primarily based on research, under principal investigator, David Drachman, MD, through 2004 when NIH funding ended. In 2005, her role as a neuropsychologist transitioned from research to primarily clinical focus providing evaluations of adult patients. She also supervised pre- and post-doctoral neuropsychological trainees, led a neuropsychology and behavioral neurology lecture series, and neuropsychology elective month. Currently, Dr. Swearer is working part-time conducting comprehensive neuropsychological evaluations, focusing on the study of dementia, movement disorders and multiple sclerosis. The assessments include interpreting the administered battery of psychometric test results in the context of the information obtained during the clinical interview and through behavioral observations, record review and patient history, comorbidities, social/cultural context, knowledge of base-rates, and the biological probabilities of disorders known to impact the central nervous system, among others. Indications for neuropsychological evaluations fall into five broad categories – diagnosis, treatment planning and remediation, treatment evaluation, research, and forensics.  

Dr. Swearer began studying Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other progressive dementias in 1985.She has published in three main areas, aging and dementia, visual function in healthy and clinical populations, and neuropsychological studies in neurological diseases.   Dr. Swearer’s primary research contributions have included studies of the clinical, neuropsychological, and pathological features of sporadic and familial AD, the development of assessment instruments to assess the impact of the illness, and clinical trials of pharmacological treatments to improve cognitive and behavioral functioning. 

Dr. Swearer’s interest in visual perception began in graduate school and continues to the present.  Studies have included the psychophysics of form perception and the perception of spatial relationships; age related changes in visual perception; and the study of visual perception and recognition in schizophrenia.  More recently, she was invited to contribute the following entries to the visual section of the Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology: fourier transforms, mesial temporal visual area, object recognition, optic ataxia, spatial frequency analysis, visual angle, visual field deficit.  The encyclopedia's mission is to be the primary reference in neuropsychology.