Author: DanSmith

Ready for EPS Online!

We’re all very excited about EPS online next week. We’ve got posters from Dan, Soazig and Siobhan uploaded to the OSF site and presentations from Siobhan and Dan (whose talk is much too long at 8mins, but some just people love the sound of thier own voice 😉 ). It’ll be our first online conference so not really sure what to expect, but hopefully we can foward to some lively discussions!

Soazig’s poster describes some work we did with an excellent group of dissertation students, whose project explored  the impact of holding things in WM on presaccadic attention. The take-home here is that we got some nice interference effects, suggesting some shared control between presaccadic attention and VWM: https://osf.io/djrvz/

Siobhan’s poster outlines the first complete experiment from her PhD, which was a conceptual replication of Schneegans & Bayes (2016) study that argued for a resource model of spatial working memory. She replicated the basic finding, but the devil is in the detail, as excluding trials with eye-movements produces some interesting changes to the modelling https://osf.io/nphqv/

Dan’s poster argues that a classic claim in cognitive psychology (that eogenous attention gradually accumulates at a cued location) is probably wrong, and instead argues that exogenous attention is fully deployed by at least 30ms after cue onset  https://osf.io/tn3gz/

Finally, if you’re interested in social attention you should check out Dr Emma Morgan’s poster showing how autistic traits modulate the effects of mental state attribution on gaze cueing /https://osf.io/ud2yz/.

Hope you enjoy our posters and talks, we’ll be available for discussion via twitter if you have any questions: @AttentionLab, @SoazigCasteau, @SiobhanMcateer4

Use of Prism Glasses in PSP questionnaire now live!

Coronavirus has meant many of our projects have ground to a halt, but in spite of the disruption we’ve been pressing on by moving some research online. Something we’re delighted to be making progress with is Dan Ford and James Ireland’s MSc project, which explores the use of prism glasses by people with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP). People with PSP often have problems looking downwards, which makes it hard for them to see what is happening in the lower visual field. Many everyday tasks like eating, reading and using a computer rely on being able to look down into the lower part of the visual field, which makes them very difficult for people with PSP. Prism glasses bend the light so that that the lower visual field can be seen without having to move the eyes. They are cheap and easy to use, so appear to have great potential as a compensatory tool. They are widely used to treat other neurological disorders which affect vision, such has hemispatial neglect and hemianopia.

However, prisms do have some disadvantages. For example, they can be heavy and it takes time to get used to the way they change how the world looks. Furthermore, nobody really knows how useful they are or how widely used they are because nobody has asked people with PSP. Dan and James’s project aims to start answering this important issue by surveying people with PSP about their attitudes towards, and experiences of, using prism glasses. It’s one of the first surveys of its kind and we’re hoping that the results will help us better understand how people use prisms, whether they find them useful, and/or the problems or impediments that people experience when using prism glasses. If you have PSP and would like to take part the questionnaire can be found here:

https://durhampsychology.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eqxcolUWzqVSPjv

Dan and James are being supervised by Dr Alison Lane and the project is a collaboration with the PSP Association.  You can find out more about Dr Ali Lane’s research on neurorehabilitation on her homepage.

If you are interested, some of our related research can be found here:

 

 

Special Issue Deadline Extended to 31st July

We’ve had a lot of interest in the special issue (thank you everyone!) and given the challenges facing our community following the lockdowns across the world we have decided to extend the deadline for our Special Issue of Cortex “Cognitive and Motor Processes in Visuospatial Attention” until the 31st July 2020. The full call for papers can be found below, we looking forward to seeing some great work!

Is preattentive search constrained by the oculomotor system?

Yes. At least, that’s what we claim in the latest paper from the Durham arm of the MotorBias project, which has now been accepted for a special issue of Attention, Perception & Psychophysics honouring Anne Triesman. In this study we explored what happened to visual search when we presented search arrays at positions that can be seen but are beyond the Effective Oculomotor Range (EOMR; ie. positions that could not be reached with saccadic eye movement). In short, we found that preattentive, feature search was significantly impaired but conjunction search was not. The twist on our previous projects which used cueing tasks (e.g. Casteau & Smith 2020) or the eye-abduction technique (Smith et al., 2014)  was that we parametrically varied the eccentricity of the search array across 6 different positions. This meant we could precisely localise the eccentricity at which feature search became impaired in relation to each participants EOMR. Critically, the drop in feature search performance occurred when the arrays were moved from just within the range of eye-movements to just beyond the range of eye-movements, and was stable at more eccentric locations (see figure 1) . The latter finding is important, as it mean we can rule out the possibility that people simply got worse at search tasks as stimuli are presented further into the periphery.

Figure 1: Time to detect a colour feature singleton. The X axis illustrate the position of the search array relative to the participants EOMR. -1 is the location just within the EOMR, +1 and +2 are the two locations just beyond the EOMR.

It therefore seems that the EOMR imposes a significant constraint on the ability to reflexively orient to salient stimuli, but not on the voluntary shifts of attention associated with conjunction or ‘attentive’ search. This pattern of data is echoes our other findings (reviewed in Casteau & Smith 2019), and is consistent with the broader claim that Oculomotor theories of spatial attention such as OMRH and Premotor Theory are only tenable for exogenous, covert orienting.  Thanks to the ESRC and Durham University the paper is open access, and you can read it by clicking here

 

Cortex Special Issue: Call for Papers

We’re delighted to announce that the journal “Cortex” has agreed to host a special issue based around the Symposium on “Cognitive & Motor Processes in Visual Attention” we hosted in Durham earlier this year! The SI will be edited by Dan, Soazig, Stefan and Thomas and is a really exciting opportunity to share work on the relationship between cognition and motor control. The call for papers and SI description is below and is available on the Cortex website . The submission portal will open on 15th February and close on 15th July.

The ability to orient attention in space is fundamental to our ability to successfully interact with our environment, as demonstrated by the profound problems experienced by patients with neuropsychological deficits of attention. Understanding the mechanisms of attentional orienting has been central question in cognitive neuropsychology, and although much progress has been made some important questions remain unanswered. For example, there is broad agreement that there is some relationship between the motor processes involved in the control of eye-movements and the cognitive processes involved in attentional selection. However, the precise nature of this relationship remains controversial, with some scholars arguing for an almost complete functional overlap, others arguing for complete functional dissociation and a variety of views between these poles. Furthermore, the interplay between visuospatial working memory, visuospatial attention and oculomotor control is not well understood, despite great progress in understanding the neural and cognitive mechanisms of each individual processes. Finally, it is not clear to what extent the theoretical advances in understanding the interactions between spatial attention and oculomotor control can be used inform the development of new therapies for neuropsychological disorders such as hemianopia and neglect. This special issue will bring together empirical and review articles that offer new insights into the functional role of attentional and motor systems in cognitive processes, and/or seek to apply the principles that govern the relationship between attention, memory and motor control to solving applied questions relating to the clinical diagnosis and rehabilitation of neuropsychological disorders.