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…
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 DelleStellene” 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 UniversitaCattolica delSacroCoure, which is housed in the cloisters of the beautiful oldmonastery 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 EmrahDuzel 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.
Looking along the cloisters
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 minsI 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.UnfortunatelyI 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 Miniussion 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 colleaguesand 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 issuebut 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 ourmore applied neuropsychological work on Attention & Memory in Progressive Supranuclear Palsy and Parkinson’s Disease (e.g. Smith & Archibald 2019) .
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 1st 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.
The conference dinner in full swingViews over Alicante Harbour from the Castell. A zealous museum attendant chased me back to to the party after taking this one!Looking up to the castle- the narrow roads meat our bus ride took some time and involved a complicated set of transfers between busses
A couple of weeks ago I was invited down to Sheffield to present an overview of our recent findings to the PsyPAG annual conference. PsyPAG is the official postgraduate section of the BPS and covers all aspects of applied and academic psychology, so although I was part of the ‘Cognitive’ stream, I thought I should try and make my talk a bit broader than the usual premotor-theory bashing schtick Soazig and I indulge in. I took some inspiration from a talk Ray Klein gave in Durham a few years back where he talked about oculomotor readiness theories in terms of embodied cognition, and from the recent RIO group meeting I attended, where Dan Eaves and I discussed the many similarities between motor theories of attention and motor theories of imagery. I was keen to mention some recent data on spatial working memory in Progressive Supranuclear Palsy and framing the talk in the broad terms of ‘visual cognition’ gave me licence to talk about a wider range of topics than just Premotor theory. With this theme I managed to touch on our earlier work with Case A.I, some eye-abduction data, Soazig’s recent data on search and cueing beyond the Effective Oculomotor Range and a bit on PSP. In the end I think this approach was quite successful at keeping people engaged with the talk, with lots of people nodding and nobody frowning too much! Interestingly, the questions were really focused on the applications of the research to different disorders, such as ADHD. On reflection, I think offering a more thorough discussion of the potential applications of our project in terms of rehab. For example, touching the kind of work Joris Elshout is doing in the Utrecht leg of the project, might have been a good idea. At the end of the talk I was surprised and delighted to be given some mementos of the occasion, which were only slightly awkward to carry back on the train 😉. If you are interested in seeing the slides, they can be found here: “Are cognitive processes embodied in the motor system?”
Around my talk I had an enjoyable time looking through the many and varied posters. My favourite was from Gabriele Pesimena that examined to what extent perspective taking was disrupted by changes to the perspective of the avatar. Pleasingly, changing perspective had no effect, just as Geoff Cole had shown a couple of years ago! Many other posters utilised eye-tracking in one way or another, and this technique really seems to be becoming commonplace (although TBH in some cases it wasn’t always clear why eye-tracking was being used). There was also time to catch a couple of talks, and I particularly enjoyed Ben Butterworth (a Durham Psychology alumni) outlining the challenges of his research on the effects of alcohol on memory performance, and Suzy Hodgson’s talk on the roles new fathers play and how they interact with heath services. The talk sessions were very good with a really enthusiastic and engaged audience. There was also an excellent lunch, although I had a slightly awkward moment when I got shooed away from some very tasty cakes which apparently belonged to a different conference! However, all was not lost, as I subsequently discovered the Psychology cakes in the poster session 😊. I also bumped into Ellen Ridley, who was receiving a Masters award for her research at Durham and offered her my congratulations. I really enjoyed the conference and would definitely recommend it to any psychology postgrads looking for an opportunity to share their work in progress and gain experience giving talks. Its also worth noting that PsyPAG offers many awards and small grants that can really help PGR develop their careers Finally, I would like to thank Suzanne Hodgson for the invitation to give the keynote.
Last week Soazig and I co-organised a workshop to mark the end of our 3-year ORA collaboration with Stefan van der Stigchel and Thomas Schenk, and here are a few reflections on how things went.
Left to right: Dan Smith, Teuni ten Brink, Trevor Crawford, Stefan van der Stigchel, Joris Elshout, Anna Grubert, Soazig Casteau, Nina Hanning, Laure Pisella, Therese Collins, Martin Rolfs, Karin Ludwig, Chris Olivers, Marissa Carrasco , Paul Butler
The workshop kicked off on Wednesday with the arrival with many of our invited speakers and our two keynotes. The only event we had planned was a meal in the evening at a local tapas restaurant. There was a minor but rather stressful hiccup when it emerged that our booking had mysteriously vanished, but Soazig sorted out another restaurant (she got the owner to find us something!) while I fussed around our gang of 12 visitors. Fortunately, the evening was warm, there was lots of catching-up to do and the new restaurant was just a couple of minutes’ walk away so nobody seemed to mind too much. After dinner most people went back to the accommodation at Stephenson College, while I scoured Durham city centre with Marisa and Thomas looking for plug adaptors. Sadly, our hunt was in vain; unlike New York and Munich, Durham isn’t really a 24 hour city!
The talks began after lunch the following day. Most of our delegates spent the morning walking up and down Cardiac Hill (we sit at the top of quite a steep hill) to get ‘proper coffee’ from the Calman café, while and we rushed around putting up signs and poster boards and getting the registration desk ready. We were very fortunate to be assisted by Ellie, who was on a work experience placement from a local school. As the morning progressed I spent more and more time schmoozing people as they arrived, while Soazig and Ellie got people organised, and by 12:20 we were ready to go. After a few words from me (no fire drill, directions to the loos, etc) Marisa Carrasco gave our first keynote which outlined some important dissociations between presaccadic attention and covert attention in terms of their effects on response gain and tuning in the visual system. There was also some impressive new research on covert orienting within the fovea. The take-home from this seemed to be that endogenous covert orienting could occur simultaneously with but independently of microsaccadic eye-movements. I enjoyed this very much until it also transpired that a similar dissociation was observed for exogenous orienting! The ‘kilotrials’ approach (where they count trials in thousands, not tens or hundreds) is one I find hugely impressive, but I do wonder about the effect this volume of practice has on psychological processes which are known to be sensitive to learning, such as attention. The remainder of this session comprised talks from Martin Rolfs, who argued that the primary function of presaccadic attention was to serve perceptual continuity, Casimir Ludwig, who elegantly argued that current models of saccade control that rely on race models do not adequately account for the effects of foveal load on saccade latency, and Trevor Crawford, who described deficits of saccade control and working memory in Alzhiemers disease that seem to offer an important early marker for the disease. Trevor’s talk also included some footage of visuomotor actions (AD patients making a cup of tea). It was striking how normal the eye-movement of these patients were when performing a well practiced, real world task, compared to the profound deficits observed under lab conditions. He concluded by cautioning us to consider to what extent the ‘deficits’ we observe in our clever lab-based experiments reflect the functional impairments experienced by patients.
After a coffee break our second session got underway with a talk from Nina Hanning, who presented some impressive data from her PhD research and argued against our proposal that exogenous, covert orienting is tied to the oculomotor system (you can read a more extensive discussion of her paper here). We didn’t get much of a chance to discuss this in the session but had a very good chat about it at the conference dinner later in the day. Therese Collins then gave a talk on the reference frame of action prediction, followed by a bit of change of pace in which Anna Grubert give a hugely entertaining and informative talk on the time-course of activation of search templates, which seem to be flexibly activated in the 600ms or so leading to the expected onset of a search array. As a special treat Stefan gave us an overview of the recent debate about how to interpret the finding that attention is not allocated to the endpoint of saccades that land between a target and distractor. Luca Wollenberg had his say too, and much like the discussion between Nina and myself, everything was very civilised. The day ended with a poster session and drinks reception, followed by dinner at St. Hilde & St. Bede College, where we had a veggie starter, roast chicken & veg, cheesecake then coffee. There was lots of wine, but no beer much to the disgruntlement of our German colleagues!
Day two was thankfully a bit cooler than day 1, and the focus was much more on neuropsychological aspects of attention and eye movements. Laure Pisella gave a lovely talk outlining a number of dissociations between presaccadic attention and covert attention in patients with parietal lobe lesions, which was followed by a very detailed study of transsaccadic memory in patients with right parietal brain damage from Teuni ten Brink. Contrary to previous reports, these patients had no specific problem with transsaccadic memory, although there was a global reduction in spatial memory performance. Monika Harvey then gave a very thought-provoking talk on the use of tDCS in and RCT trial for neurorehabilitation of neglect. The key message was that although patients tolerated tDCS well (and in fact were quite keen to receive it) it was really hard to recruit to the trial which required 10 in-hospital sessions, and ultimately the tDCS didn’t seem to greatly potentiate the therapy. I found this a really important result, as there is often a big song and dance about the therapeutic potential for tDCS, and Monika’s work sounded a welcome note of caution about the efficacy and feasibility of tDCS interventions. The final act of this session was a keynote from Chris Olivers, who gave a riveting talk outlining a computational account of the role visual working memory in the control of action that really got the audience thinking and was much discussed in the lunch break.
In the final session Soazig gave a brief outline of some of key ideas we had set out to test out in the ORA grant, then discussed two key experiments in which we showed that exogenous covert attention is constrained by the oculomotor range. This caused some discussion between Marisa, Nina and ourselves, as to how to reconcile our different findings, which has yet to be resolved. Karin Ludwig then presented data from a trial using gaze-contingent changes in visual scenes to treat spatial neglect, followed by Joris Elshout who argued that patients with visual neglect present a dissociation between presaccadic attention, which was largely preserved, and covert attention, which was severely impaired. This talk closed the meeting, and there was just enough time for a team photo before everyone went on their way.
Overall, I feel like the meeting was a big success (based on lots of people saying lots of nice things), but boy was it tiring! I think my favourite part was the poster session and conference dinner. It seemed to me that this was where all the really interesting conversations took place, and I certainly got a huge amount from the chat I had with Stefan and Nina about how to reconcile our different experimental data. I must admit to also being really thrilled to meet Chris Olivers and Marisa Carrasco. In particular Marisa is someone whose work I am rather in awe of and I had felt rather nervous about meeting with her. It was a delight to find that she was so down-to-earth and she really set the tone for what I think was a friendly, informal but also very high quality meeting.
A few last observations in no particular order
We put everyone up in Stephenson College. It was cheap and cheerful (except for Thomas, whose shower was broken), and within walking distance of the conference venue. I had worried that this type of accommodation might be a bit low-rent for our very eminent speakers, but everyone seemed happy with it. I actually really enjoyed the communal breakfast at long banqueting tables, it felt a bit like reliving my days as an undergrad!
We didn’t get as many PhD students as I would have liked, perhaps because we clashed with the EPS meeting in Bournemouth. It might also be because we relied mainly on advertising the meeting on VisionList, CVNET and Twitter. If I was doing this sort of thing again I would definitely explore the possibility of promoting the meeting via societies like the EPS and BPS.
We did conference folders with a pen, notepad and schedule. Lots of people didn’t bother with the pack, so in future I’d consider just provide a pen & a schedule when people register, or maybe nothing at all.
We over-catered, especially on the wine and nibbles for the poster session. We had ~50 people and we would probably have been better ordering for ~30. We didn’t get much advice on how much food was appropriate for 50 people, so we wasted quite a lot of food and cash. I’m not sure how this can be resolved, but there must be some good resources somewhere that can help with catering budgets.
Germans like good coffee and beer and are very happy to let you know about these preferences. Next time round I’d offer much less wine and more beer (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) at the poster session.
It’s at least a 2 person job. I was really grateful to Soazig for co-organising the meeting, and she in fact did all the hard stuff like chasing people for abstracts, organising the food and troubleshooting during the meeting (she found fans, printed posters, booked restaurants, taxi’s & tours, sourced plugs & adaptors and no doubt all sorts of other things I don’t know about).
It’s expensive. Even with relatively budget accommodation our meeting will probably come in at >6k. We included funds for the meeting in the grant (thank you ESRC!) but we still needed some extra financial support from the Durham Psychology Department, for which I am also very grateful.
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…
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.
meeting earlier this year 
am, I thought I should try and make my talk a bit broader than the usual premotor-theory bashing schtick Soazig and I indulge in. I took some inspiration from a talk 