Category Archives: Blog

Dan reports from the EPS / CSBBCS meeting at Dundee University

Posted on by
Reply

Dan discussing the evidence for a visual search deficit in PSP

I had a very enjoyable trip up to Dundee to attend the joint Experimental Psychology Society / Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognive Science meeting at Dundee University, where I reported some of the reults of our Vivensa Foundation project on Cognition in PSP and Parkinson’s disease (summarised here). As a joint meeting the attendance was much bigger than i’m used to at EPS meetings, and as always with the EPS there was a rich variety of topics, with a good sprinkling of talks on attention, visual search and working memory (full programme is here) . My talk had a nice slot on Wednesday afternoon and there was a decent turn out, including Oculomotor Readiness Hypothesis guru Ray Klein. The talk was well received with some good points about the possible role of crowding in the search deficit experienced by PSP patients, and the role of working memory in complex cancellation tasks and the effect of dopmaine on visual search.

Ziyi introducing her PhD work on cognitive bottlenecks in visual search

Linda reporting some surprising results on the role of gender in mediating maths anxiety in 8-11 year olds

Durham colleagues Ziyi Wang and Linda Arrighi also gave very interesting talks on thier research projects, with Artie Graham presenting a poster on the effect of chemogenetic inactivation of the dorsolateral striatum on spatial learning in rats. I particularly enjoyed the 15-min presentation format of the morning sessions, which I thought was just right for giving a general audience a feel for the key insights without getting bogged down in details. I was also impressed with the catering at the coffee breaks, although unfortunatley missed the Wednesday wine reception! The ceidlih at the Apex hotel was enjoyable, although the heat made the dancing something of an endurace event. Dundee itself was very welcoming and the new developments on the waterfront gave it a very continental feel. There is also a very nice, flat 5k route along the banks of the Tay to Dundee airport, which I ran on Thursday afternoon, and treated myself to a cheeky ice-cream in the V&A musuem gardens to recover :-). Overall it was an excellent meeting and great opportunity to catch up with old psychology chums from the UK and Canada. Hats off to Lizzie Bradford for organising such an enjoyable meeting!

Ice cream in the V&A gardens on the banks of the silvery Tay

 

 

 

Update on prism glasses projects

Posted on by
Reply

Dan wearing Hamblin Prism glasses

Autumn has arrived and with it a flurry of activity on our prism glasses project. We’ve submitted a research paper describing the results of our prism glasses survey which combined the data from our original research (see HERE for a summary) with some new data collected by Alexis as part of the Dunhill Medical Trust study. We are hopeful for some kind reviews! We’ve also been progressing with our PPIE work, and the PSP Association were kind enough to invite Dan to thier PRIM group meeting. The meeting produced some really interesting insights, and we’ll be taking those on board as we revise our research plan. Something else that became very clear from both our research paper and meetings with patients and carers is that there is very little information out there about which prism glasses might be useful for PSP, so we’ve added a bit more information about different prism types to our website. To get a more direct experience, Dan ordered some prism glasses and has been wearing around the house to see how they feel (he reports it makes it very hard to take a good selfie…). We’ve also had meetings with Prof Chrystalina Antonaides (Oxford) and Dr Lisa Alcock (Newcastle) to take the first steps towards a collaborative project looking at whether prism glasses might help with mobility and we are hoping to arrange a second survey study of prism glasses with the PSP Association.

Progress also continues with the Dunhill Medical Trust project on attention and memory in PSP.  Alexis is contining to recruit people for his age matched control group, and presented a poster showing that people with PSP have a profound deficit of visual search at Neuro 2024 in Toronto (although he nearly didn’t make it after his flight got cancelled at the last minute!).  Dan will present these results at the upcoming meeting of the British Neuropsychological Society in London later in November.

 

Summer Project Update

Posted on by
Reply

Easter term has seen Alexis making excellent progress with the PSP project. We are now well on course to hit our target of 27 people in the PSP group and can turn our thoughts to recruiting some age matched controls. Dan also presented some preliminary data from the visual search task at the PSP Association Research Information Day on 23rd of May.  His talk and many other fascinating presentations can be found on the PSPA webpage: Research Information Events – PSPA (pspassociation.org.uk). We also submitted an application to the Ulverscroft Foundation for a PhD project that (if we’re successful) will follow up our pilot project that explored the experiences of people with PSP when using prism glasses.

There was some good news for Soazig, who had a paper on the effect of labelling on aesthetic appreciation and gaze behaviour accepted in a special issue of Journal of Vision. It was also exciting to start a new project with Prof Andy Beresford from MLAC and the Bowes Museum which uses mobile eye tracking to help evaluate visitors’ experiences of the 2nd floor galleries of the Museum. Two of our psych graduates (Lucy Edgar and Catherine Guo) have temporarily joined us to run the project, which will take place over the next month and will be complemented by a lab-based study run by Flora Loh.

Lucy, Catherine, Soazig & Andy at the Bowes Museum ready to begin the eye-tracking study

Xueqing has completed the first experiments of her PhD project exploring perceptual expertise in table-tennis players. As predicited, experts were better at predicting the landing position of a table-tennis shot, particularly at early occlusion intervals. However, this advantage depends on the stroke type, and, rather surprisingly,  experts were much slower at responding than novice players. Having aced her progression viva, Xueqing is now heading off to China to recruit a large sample of elite table-tennis players to follow this finding up in a larger sample.

We are now looking forward to summer conference season. Xueqing has already presented her first experiment at the RIO group meeting in Liverpool and Dan and Soazig will be going to the Experimental Psychology Society meeting in York. Dan will present some new data on how presaccadic attention and memory based attention interact during actions, and Soazig will describe the preliminary findings of a TMS study that examines the effect of FEF neurostimulation on premotor attention shifts. Later in the summer Soazig will present at the Visual Science of Art Conference (VSAC) and European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP) in Aberdeen. Alexis will also be at ECVP, having been invited to contribute to a symposium on “Perception, Cognition and Action in Neuropsychological Patients: Bridging Science and Practice” organised by Jutta Billino & Jennifer Randerath. It is going to be a busy summer!

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.