DanSmith

Research featured in PSPMatters magazine

The PSP Association were kind enough to publish a short article about our new Dunhill Medical Trust project exploring “Can tests of cognitive function help diagnose PSP?”. You can also read the article with a nice picture here (page 15)

I first heard about PSP as a graduate student when I read a paper describing an unusual and devastating disease characterised by paralysis of the eyes. The paper reported a striking result: people with PSP had a problem moving attention that was not experienced by people with Parkinson’s disease. At the time I was doing my doctoral research and the result seemed to have profound implications for our theoretical understanding of attention. I didn’t realise at this time was that it might also be important for the purposes of diagnosis. I was keen to explore how PSP affected attention further, but unfortunately due to the rarity of the condition we had no luck finding participants. At this point end I moved on to working with stroke survivors. However, as my career progressed I often thought about the condition, and one day happened to mention it to Dr Neil Archibald, consultant neurologist at James Cook University Hospital. He had a particular interest in PSP and was keen to collaborate. He put me in touch with the PSP Association, and together we ran a workshop with patients, carers, clinicians and academics to generate research ideas.

One issue that was important to everyone was diagnosis. Because PSP is rare and shares many symptoms with Parkinson’s disease, a great many PSP patients are misdiagnosed. This is distressing to patients and carers and can lead to unnecessary prescription of medications with potentially harmful side effects. Out of the workshop emerged an idea for a pilot study comparing mental functions such as attention and memory in people with PSP and Parkinson’s disease, with the long- term aim of evaluating whether such tests could be useful for diagnosis. Over the next 2 years we recruited a group people with PSP and another group of people with Parkinson’s disease. We asked them to do computer tasks that tested their eye-movements, attention and short-term memory. The results of the pilot study were clear: People with PSP could not make any up or down eye-movements, and their left and right eye-movements were also affected. Importantly, we found impairments in attention and memory that seemed to correlate with the eye-movement problems. These results were very promising, and the Dunhill Medical Trust subsequently agreed to fund a 3-year project designed to develop a more complete understanding of how PSP affects visual cognition. This project will begin next year, and we hope it will bring us a step closer to finding a cheap, effective and reliable tool for the early diagnosis of PSP.

Reflections on Bianca de Haan’s seminar “Selective Attention in Multi-Target Environments”

This week our Psychology seminar was given by Dr Bianca de Haan from Brunel University, who came to explain her research on attentional selection in multi target displays. Bianca and I shared an office as PhD students in Nottingham in the early noughties, so I was delighted to have the chance to catch up with her, show off our labs in Durham and hear about her current research. In her talk Bianca presented a series of studies exploring the mechanisms by which we are able to select more than one item in a scene (e.g. when we are required to track multiple moving objects when driving). She began by telling everyone I spent most of my time as a PhD student playing Championship Manager (which is only partly true), then kicked off the science with a study of patients with right brain damage who present with visual extinction, which is their tendency to ignore the leftmost of two simultaneously presented stimuli. She showed that these extinction effects also affected subliminally presented cues. Interestingly, other patients with right brain damage but no extinction also showed disrupted subliminal cueing, indicating that extinction is caused by combination of reduced sensory processing and reduced attentional capacity. I found this quite a striking result, and when Sozaig and I compared notes afterwards we both had the same thought; how do these patients perform when the response is a saccade, not a button press? Bianca then used data from series of neuroimaging studies to argue that the Intraparietal Sulcus is the key anatomical correlate for multi-target selection, and showed that theta-burst TMS over IPS disrupted multi-target selection by reducing the availability of VSWM resources. Interestingly, TMS over TPJ had no effect on selection, despite this region frequently being identified as the locus of extinction by neuropsychological studies. She reflected on some possible reasons for this discrepancy between the neuroimaging and neuropsychological data, concluding that ‘that’s science for you!’. From a theoretical point of view, Bianca’s work is rooted in the Biased Competition view of attention, and during the questions she seemed sceptical of other approaches such as Premotor Theory, although of course there are regions in IPS which code eye-movements. There was also some lively discussion of the nature of the relationship between attention and visuospatial working memory, which Bianca argued were largely the same thing. Overall the talk was very accessible and perfectly pitched for our mixed audience of masters students, PhD students and staff, as was evident by the number of questions at the end. Following the seminar I gave Bianca a quick tour and showed off the Oculomotor Lab, after which Soazig met with her to discuss the MotorBias project. Later in the afternoon we strolled down to the Victoria Inn for Psychology Drinks, then had dinner in the Tapas Factory. I’m really grateful to Bianca for coming up and giving such a thought-provoking seminar which filled my head with lots of ideas for new studies, if only we could find some people with visual extinction…

You can find out more about Bianca’s research here: https://www.brunel.ac.uk/people/bianca-de-haan

New lab member Siobhan McAteer arrives!

We’re delighted to welcome Siobhan McAteer to the lab! Siobhan arrives from Oxford, where she has just completed an MSc in Psychological Research. Her project “How do we store spatial working memories?” will examine the role of the eye movement system in spatial working memory with a view to applying resource theories of visual short-term memory (e.g. Bays & Husain, 2008) to spatial working memory. Siobhan’s research is supported by an ESRC NINEDTP doctoral scholarship and she will be 2nd supervised by Dr Anthony McGregor. Welcome (back) to Durham Siobhan!

Federation of European Neuropsychology Societies 2019: Conference Report

In my final conference of a busy summer I attended the Federation of European Neuropsychology Societies (FESN) which took place from 5th -7th September in Milan. I arrived on the 4th and stayed in the conference hotel “Palazzo Delle Stellene” which was a converted monastery right beside the church that houses Michelangelo’s Last Supper. The hotel was very atmospheric, although the plumbing was a bit noisy and there was a long queue for the single coffee machine at breakfast! The talks on the first day didn’t start until lunchtime, so after breakfast I strolled down to the Piazza del Duomo to take the obligatory selfie at both ends of the square for use in lectures on neglect 😉 .

Looking across the Piazza Del Duomo from the steps of the Duomo

The conference itself was hosted in the Universita Cattolica del Sacro Coure, which is housed in the cloisters of the beautiful old monastery of Sant’Ambrogio. The main auditorium (Aula Magna) was richly decorated, as was the Crypt, which held some of the other sessions. This grandeur did come at a cost, as the rooms tended to be long and narrow which wasn’t brilliant for their acoustics and meant it could be hard to read detail on some slides. The opening address was an interesting and unusually political appeal to science administrators and governments to protect researchers doing animal work. It was followed by a keynote from Emrah Duzel explaining the functional anatomy of episodic memory loss in Alzhiemers disease, then lunch in the grounds. After lunch I attended the ‘Body in the Brain’ symposium, which discussed recent developments in the understanding of embodiment and then an excellent session on networks of attentional control chaired by Alfredo Spanga. My main take homes from this session were that the old idea that the right hemisphere is specialised for spatial attention has really stood the test of time, but also that people in this field really neglect the role of the oculomotor system in visuospatial attention.

Speaking of attention and eye-movements, my talk was on ‘Associations and dissociations between oculomotor readiness and covert attention’ and was part of a Colloquium organised by Thomas Schenk. As the talks was only 15 mins I covered our the studies on attention within and beyond the range of eye movements we recently published in Cortex (Casteau & Smith 2018) and only touched on the broader literature, which we reviewed in Casteau & Smith (2019). I was more nervy than usual about this talk, partly because it was in Italy, which I think of as the home of Premotor theory, and partly because I knew several of my old bosses (Thomas and Steve Jackson) would be there and I wanted to put on a good show. Unfortunately I was last in the evening session so attendance was a wee bit sparse, but in the end I think it went quite well, and I got some good questions from Steve and Janet Bultitude afterwards. The other speakers were Ana Chica, who gave a very nice talk on the motoric and perceptual effects of Inhibition of Return, Christian Poth who demonstrated that there is some trans-saccadic competition between unattended objects and Karin Ludwig, who reported experiments showing that visual scanning training can bias attention in healthy participants. In the following days I attended some fascinating talks on Neglect in the symposium organed by Monika Harvey and saw a superb keynote from Carlo Miniussi on the challenges of applying neurostimulation techniques such as tDCS to neurorehabilitation. Masud Husain also gave an excellent talk on apathy, showing that in many cases the core problem is that patients are not motivated by outcomes with high rewards. I also attended the poster sessions, but as these were only an hour long and over lunch I didn’t see as many as I would have liked. There was some excellent work, and I particularly enjoyed Monika Halika’s poster “Disputing neglect-like symptoms in unilateral chronic pain” which showed there is no unilateral attentional bias in chronic pain patients with upper limb pain using a TOJ task.

I had not been to FESN before and I thought there were some interesting comparisons between it and ECEM, which Soazig & I had attended earlier in the summer (you can read a report here). The

The Aula Magna, viewed from the stage. There were a few more people by the time my talk started!

meetings felt of a similar size, with around 400-500 delegates and this gave them both a feeling of intimacy and offered excellent opportunities for catching up with friends and colleagues and meeting new people. If anything FESN offered me more opportunities for ‘networking’ (as opposed to gossiping with old friends). A nice example of this was probably the couple of hours I spent in the company of Thomas and Sergio Della Salla, listening to them discuss the state of academic publishing. It was interesting to hear a perspective from ‘inside’ the industry (Thomas is former section editor for Neuropsychologia and Sergio the EiC of Cortex). It was also a salutatory lesson in the power of personal contact; for some time I’ve harboured an ambition to edit a special issue but not really known how to go about it. I tentatively mentioned this to Sergio, only to have him beckon seductively while crooning ‘send it to me…’. So, watch this space! The conference registration fee was quite high at 400 euro for early, non-members, but as with ECEM this included excellent plentiful lunches and a welcome reception. Although the meeting was intimate it felt a bit more formal than ECEM, with many delegates adopting a ‘smart causal’ look or even suits, despite the warm weather. The talks themselves also tended to have a more sober delivery, perhaps as Christian Poth suggested, because many of the delegates were also clinicians and were discussing research related to their own patients.

Overall I thought it was an excellent meeting with a very high standard of talk. The highlight was probably Miniussi’s talk on tDCS, although I was also very tickled when Radek Ptak approached Thomas and I saying “Hey! You’re the Premotor Theory guys!”. I would definitely consider attending FESN again and it would be an excellent forum to present the results from our more applied neuropsychological work on Attention & Memory in Progressive Supranuclear Palsy and Parkinson’s Disease (e.g. Smith & Archibald 2019) .

Casteau, S. & Smith, D.T. (2019). Associations and Dissociations between Oculomotor Readiness and Covert Attention. Vision 3(2): 17
Casteau, S. & Smith, D.T. (2018). Covert Attention Beyond the Range of Eye-movements: Evidence for a Dissociation between Exogenous and Endogenous orienting. Cortex

ECEM 2019 Conference Report

Soazig and I working on our talks in the conference restaurant & bar

The 2019 edition of the European Conference on Eye Movements (ECEM) took place in blisteringly hot Alicante this year. This coincided almost perfectly with the end of our ORA grant so Soazig and I were keen to go and present some of the key findings to the eye-movement community. It was also very welcome to trade the dull and rainy UK with its Brexit blues for sunnier climes 😊. We were fortunate to both get talk slots; my talk was first in our session, which was chaired by Marissa Carrasco. I described some experiments demonstrating how the Effective Oculomotor Range constrains spatial attention, including data from our recent Cortex paper, and some new data (slides here: DanSmith ECEM 2019). Everyone seemed interested and there was lots of nodding, although I once made the mistake of making eye-contact with a frowning Heiner Deubel which rather to put me off my stride! There were some good questions but I fumbled the one on IOR a bit, which was annoying because all the data are in the Cortex paper and I just forgot about it. I then moderated for Marissa’s talk (since she came to Durham we are now on 1^st name terms 😊) but there was then a rather comical/awkward moment when we had a brief discussion/disagreement about how much time was left 10 mins into her talk. (I know it was exactly 10 minutes BECAUSE I WAS TIMING IT WITH A TIMER). Luca Wollenberg was next, and he presented some nice new data on the time-course attention in averaging saccades, and got a good laugh offering to do a little dance in lieu of taking questions. The session concluded with two interesting talks from Visser, Renswoude & colleagues on attention to features in category learning. In the final session of the meeting Soazig presented data on interactions between WM and presaccadic attention that was so hot-off-the press she was still running analyses the day before the talk. Unfortunately, I missed it having booked an early flight, but from what I hear on Twitter it went very well, and the data are certainly very exciting.

In addition to seeing the talks on attention and eye-movements in our own sessions, one of the pleasures of ECEM is hearing about the range of cognitive processes that are informed by studies of eye-movements, and this year was no different. Some particular highlights for me were Edwin Dalmaijer’s talk on disgust, a very insightful discussion of eye-movements in Parkinson’s disease with Chyrstalina Antoniades, the keynote from Jenny Groh explaining the motoric effects of auditory attention, Jonas Ludwig’s talk on the ‘zero bias’ in decision making and Eugene McSorley’s talk on saccade programming. Pupillometry seemed to be in vogue this year too, and I enjoyed Sebastiaan Mathots talk describing on pupillometric marker for exploration vs exploitation modes of visual search. I also really enjoyed the session on “Looking at Nothing” chaired by Johansson & Rosner. I sat in on a similar session at my first ECEM in Lund (2013) and it was interesting to see how the debate had moved on from a discussion of the existence of the looking at nothing effect to a discussion of its function. It also gave me a few ideas for experiments on imagery, which chimed with the ideas I discussed with Dan Eaves at the RIO group meeting earlier this year (REPORT).

In general, I was impressed with the quality of talks (with the odd exception), although it was a bit unfortunate that some of the screens in the lecture rooms were rather small. There was lots of interest in the poster sessions too, my favourite poster being this one from Rakesh Nanjappar ->. It was also amusing to watch Ken Scott-Brown hovering around his two students (Krystian Ciesielski and Crystal Silver) like an expectant father as they presented their work. Mercifully there was only one of the ‘new posters’ where most of the body is taken up with the conclusion, as if the purpose of a poster session is to put up an advert. The poster sessions were also a great opportunity to catch up with old chums like Ken, Doug Barrett, Eugene McSorely, Iain Gilchrist, Edwin Dalmeijer and Cas Ludwig. Our discussions during the posters were well lubricated with wine, beer and soft drinks & there was plenty of tapas-style food at lunchtime which was included with the conference registration fee. I thought the quality of the catering at lunchtime was excellent, but not everyone shared this view and I think there were some issues with the vegetarian selections. In the evenings we tended to eat late, as is the Spanish way, and a real highlight for me was the evening in the tapas bar where the staff rang a bell whenever they got a tip. I also really enjoyed the conference dinner in the spectacular surroundings of Castell Santa Barbara, although I paid for it the next day!

A minor gripe was that the lack of wi-fi, and at first this felt very frustrating. However, on reflection I think it was probably a bit of a blessing in disguise as I spent a lot more time talking with people, which is probably one of the main points of a conference! Overall ECEM 2019 was an excellent meeting which I found intellectually stimulating, produced some excellent schmoozing and was thoroughly enjoyable. Hats off to the organizing committee for doing a great job, I’m already looking forward to Leicester 2021.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: