Author: DanSmith

New Year Update 2024: Recruitment boost, Siobhan’s graduation and a new paper!

Maria and Dan at the Durham PSPA meeting at the Bay Horse

The last couple of months have seen significant progress with the PSP project and some important milestones for Siobhan’s PhD. We’ve been delighted to have seen a big increase in people volunteering for the PSP project, and I’m pleased to say we are now at 20 participants, which means we are slightly ahead of schedule. We’re particularly grateful to the wonderful research nurses in James Cook, Gateshead and Sunderland for their efforts to recruit people, and to the local PSPA co-ordinators who have helped publicise the study. We still need people to take part, especially for our age matched control group, so please get in touch if you are interested. We also had a very nice meeting with Maria from the County Durham PSPA, who let Alexis and I update the group on progress with the project and pitch some ideas for new research projects. They gave us quite a grilling, but the feedback was extremely valuable!

Siobhan at the graduating with her PhD at the winter congregation in Durham cathedral

It was also lovely to catch up with Siobhan, who returned to Durham to graduate her PhD at Durham Cathedral. It was a very proud day! There was more good news from Siobhan, as the 3rd paper from her PhD was accepted and appeared in Vision Research on the last day of the year. The paper shows that measuring VSWM capacity with mouse pointing produces a rather different pattern of resource allocation than measuring with finger pointing (imprecision asymptotes at set sizes larger than 2, rather than monotonically increasing), we think because of the additional visuomotor transformations required by mouse pointing. You can read all about it here: Precision in spatial working memory examined with mouse pointing – ScienceDirect

Autumn Update: FESN 2023, new paper published

It has been a busy summer for the MotorBias project with lots of progress on several projects. Alexis’ main focus has been the Dunhill Medical Trust project on Attention and Memory in PSP and Parkinsons’ disease, which reached a notable milestone when we reached our recruitment target of 27 for the Parkinsons group. This excellent achievement is thanks due to the fantastic efforts of Susan Wilson at Sunderland Royal and Bryony Storey at Gateshead who have provided us with a steady stream of willing volunteers, and of course the participants themselves whose time and effort we are very grateful for!  Dan has also been busy with the PSP project, running very some very informative PPI sessions with Susan at Sunderland Royal to get feedback on the potential for a project exploring prism use in PSP.

Another highlight of the summer  was the Federation of European Neuropsychology Societies 2023, where we were  fortunate to be joined by Prof Chrystalina Antonaides and Dr Luca Wollenberg in the city of Thessalonki  for a symposium on “Visual cognition and oculomotor control in neurodegenerative disease” organized by Dan and Thomas.  Alexis presented a preliminary analysis of the visual search tasks, reporting that people with PSP find visual searh significantly more challenging than people with Parkinsons’ disease. Chrystalina outlined her recent advances in using measures of oculomotor control to track progression of Parkinson’s disease and Luca who explained his exciting research showing decoupling of attention and saccades after training. Although unfortunately Prof Trevor Crawford wasn’t able to join as planned, the symposium produced lively discussion in the session and at the symposium dinner afterwards. We’re very hopeful that some the seeds of ideas planted over dinner and well watered with Greek beer will grow into future collaborations!

Overall the conference was very good with some some thought provoking keynotes. Alfredo Spagna gave a particularly compelling talk arguing against a functional role for V1 in mental imagery. Unfortunately the poster sessions were a great disappointment. Posters were electronic, but with only three display screens it was impossible to browse the posters at leisure, which is one of the great pleasures of a conference. It also severely limited the time Dan had to present the results of the VSWM and social cognition tasks, which was very frustrating. You can see the poster at the bottom of this page.

Other notable events during the summer included Siobhan getting a new job with Dr Robert Hardwick in Leuven, Belgium, a new publication from in PLOSONE in which Dan demonstrated the existence of a presaccadic perceptual impairment at the post-saccadic location of the blindspot (Smith Beierholm & Avery 2023), Shuzhe completing her masters project looking at the effect of varying cue spatial frequency on the temporal profile of exogenous attention, and Soazig submitting a paper on eye-movements and aesthetic appreciation to JoV. With the start of term imminent we’re looking forward to welcoming a our new cohort of UG and masters students and getting on with more exciting projects.

July update: PhD submission, Talks, PPI

Siobhan giving her final presentation to the Psychology Dept. Slide shows an eccentricity effect in spatial STM

It has been a busy few weeks for the Motorbias project team. The really big news was that Siobhan submitted her PhD thesis and is looking forward to her viva later this summer. We were delighted that Profs David Pearson from Anglia Ruskin university agreed to be the external examiner, with Prof Alex Easton acting as internal examiner. Siobhan also gave her final talk to the department, and it was really great to see how the whole PhD fitted together.

Alexis giving his presentation at the wolfson ECR meeting

Alexis also gave talk this month, presenting some very promising looking preliminary data on the PSP project at the Wolfson Early Career Conference. He did a great job summarizing our rather complex project and coped well with some challenging questions from the audience. It was an ideal warm-up for FESN later this summer, where he’ll be presenting as part of a symposium on “Visual cognition and oculomotor control in neurodegenerative diseases”, alongside Dr Luca Wollenberg (Ludwig Maximilian University, Germany), Prof Trevor Crawford (Lancaster University, UK) and Prof Chrystalina Antoniades (Oxford University, UK)

Dan wearing prism glasses

There have also been some exiting developments with the PSP prism glasses project (User Perspectives on the Efficacy of Prism Therapy for PSP | Motor Bias Project), as Dan has started running the Patient and Public Involvement Studies with Susan Wilson from Sunderland Royal that will hopefully inform the development of a grant exploring whether prisms actually provide functional benefits for people with PSP. The PPI work has been quite a steep learning curve, and we’re very grateful to Jo and Alex from NIHR Research Design Service NE for their advice and support in organising these sessions!

As always Dan is very keen to hear from anyone with PSP who might be interested in helping us with PPI wor, or participating in Alexis’ research project Can cognitive tests differentiate PSP and Parkinson’s disease? | Motor Bias Project, if you are interested in either please email Dan (daniel.smith2@durham.ac.uk) or Alexis (alexis.cheviet@durham.ac.uk)

 

Siobhan submits her PhD!

Today was a momentous day as Siobhan submitted her PhD thesis, “Examining the representation of spatial short term memories through the lens of resource allocation theory”.  The main take-home is that spatial short-term memory is best characterised as a flexible resource that is constrained by the amount of cortical space available, as predicted by the cortical maps hypothesis of Franconeri et al., (2013). We’re all very proud of Siobhan, especially as her PhD was profoundly disrupted by the pandemic, and it’s a real testament to her resilience and ability that 2 chapers have already been published (McAteer et al., 2023 in JoV and McAteer et al., 2023 in AP&P) with 2 more under review.  It has been a real pleasure to have Siobhan in the lab and we’ve all learned a lot, especially about mixture modelling :-).  Siobhan will be leaving us in August to take a postdoc position at Louvain University for the next step in what we’re sure will be a brilliant career. Well done and good luck Siobhan!

McAteer, Siobhan M. and McGregor, Anthony and Smith, Daniel T. (2023) ‘Oculomotor rehearsal in visuospatial working memory.’, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 85 (1). pp. 261-275.

McAteer, Siobhan M. and Ablott, Emma and McGregor, Anthony and Smith, Daniel T. (2023) ‘Dynamic resource allocation in spatial working memory during full and partial report tasks.’, Journal of Vision, 23 (2). p. 10.

 

Scottish Vision Group & FESN 2023 Symposium news

Experimental whisky tasting at SVG2023 Abertay (possibly a Taliksar, but none of us can remember…)

The last few weeks have been busy for the Motorbias project. Dan, Alexis, Siobhan and Soazig went up to Dundee to attend the Scottish Vison Group annual meeting at Abertay University. Siobhan gave a talk on resource allocation in during full and partial report tasks (now out in JoV) and Alexis presented a poster with some preliminary data from the PSP project. Dan and Soazig mainly schmoozed 😉. The programme was excellent, featuring a round table on the future of visual search, an excellent keynote on binocular by Tim Ledgeway from Nottingham (who also happened to be Dan’s internal examiner back in 2004!) and an interesting historical overview and demo of ‘binocular portraits’, which are 3D portraits viewed with a stereoscope, by Nick Wade. The Saturday scientific sessions were followed by experimental whisky tasting, which led to a few sore heads for the final day! Overall it was an very enjoyable meeting which felt a bit like a mini-ECVP.

Continuing the conference theme, Dan and Alexis were very pleased to have their symposium “Visual cognition and oculomotor control in neurodegenerative diseases” accepted at the 2023 Federation of European Societies of Neuropsychology in Thessalonkia (26th-29th Sept). They have a fantastic line-up of speakers, and the symposium will feature talks from Luca Wollenberg & motorbias project oldboy Thomas Schenk, who will describe recent developments in the understanding of the functioning of attentional mechanisms in the context of visually guided action, Trevor Crawford who will give an overview of 15 years of eye-tracking studies of working memory, attention and inhibitory control in Alzheimer’s disease, Chrystalina Antoniades who will explain how simple measures of oculomotor control can be used to diagnose and track the progression of Parkinson’s disease and Alexis, who will explain his current work exploring the potential for tests of visual cognition to facilitate differential diagnosis of PSP and PD.

Finally, after the good news about the PPI small grant we have started recruiting people for focus groups exploring how people with PSP feel about research involving prism glasses. We hope to run two sessions for 2-3 people with PSP and their partners/carers to get a feel for their priorities and ensure our research project reflects their needs. The first session will be online, so if you are interested in taking part please send an email to Dan (Daniel.smith2@durham.ac.uk)