It has been a busy summer and I’m delighted to say that the SpBellsPSP project is finally open at all 6 of our NHS sites! It has been a long & complex process, and I’m very grateful for all the help we’ve had from our Research & Innovation Services here in Durham, and the R&D departments at the collaborating trusts. It also has be great working with Caroline Fletcher and the NENC RRDN Agile team, who have been very enthusiastic about the project and given some extremely valuable insights and feedback on the processes during our ‘shakeout’ meetings. It’s the first time I’ve  used REDcap (an NHS database system for storing research data) and the Agile team’s experience with this system has been invaluable in streamlining our processes. It’s been quite a long road to get here (we are a couple of months behind schedule), but hopefully all the preparatory work will mean the next phase goes very smoothly.

Xueqing presenting some data from her PhD research examining perceptual expertise in elite table tennis players

There was some other good news – we’ve been collaborating with Dr Ali Clarke and his Phd student Manjiri Bhat, who have applied their computational model of foraging behaviour (“FOMO”) to the data we collected as part of the Vivensa foundation project on attention and memory in PSP . Manjiri presented this work at European Conference of Visual Perception (ECVP) and Scottish Vision Group (SVG), winning the Best Talk award at both meetings!  In other conference news, Soazig presented some new findings on “Neurodiverse Gaze: Autistic Traits, Attention, and Context Effects in Art Appreciation” at the Visual Science of Art Conference (VSAC), and then whizzed over to Germany to present recent work on eye-movements and visual working memory. Bobbi also presented data on foraging behaviour in Parkinson’s disease, and Xueqing presented the latest findings from her PhD work on perceptual expertise in elite table tennis at the joint ESCoP-CoPM conference in Hangzhou.  Dan missed out on conferences this summer, but will present the findings from the Vivensa foundation project at the Neuro2026 PSP and CBD International Research Symposium in London later in the year

Finally, we welcomed Tilly Marsden on a 6 week internship funded by Durham Psychology Dept. Tilly has been collecting pilot data and and conducting a systematic review on the effect of eye movements on the vividness of imagery and we are looking forward to seeing the results soon.

Clarke, ADF. and Hughes, AE., (2026). FoMo: A unifying theory of visual foraging. PLoS Computational Biology. 22 (5), e1014266-e1014266

It has been a very busy few months! The biggest development was the favourable opinion from the NHS Research Ethics Committee for SpBellsPSP, and the confirmation of C&C  at the 1st two NHS sites. We also had a training session with the RRDN agile team, who came up with some great suggestions we’ve incorporated into the Bells test app, and so we are getting very close. We’re a little bit later than I’d hoped, but we are now on target to open by the end of the June, which is very exciting.

On the publication front we are waiting to hear back from Brain Communications after a revise and resubmit decision. This paper describes the key outcomes from Alexis’s project on visual search in PSP and Parkinson’s, and we’ve got our fingers crossed for a positive outcome. A second paper on User Perspectives on Prism glasses for rehabilitation of PSP was accepted by Journal of Visual Impairment, but unfortunately is stuck in a publication queue and is not slated to come out until August. You read a summary of this research here. TL:DR? Lots of people have tried prism glasses, not many people like them, but they might be helpful for eating and reading.

Bobbi Childley joined the project to do a PhD under the supervision of Soazig. Bobbi has made a great start, and will start working with people with Parkinson’s disease next week.

We were delighted to learn that Dan has £195,000 from the MRC Gap Fund to continue the work on cognition in PSP and Parkinson’s disease. The project “Validation of the Specificity of the Bells Test for Progressive Supranuclear Palsy”, is a multi-centre collaboration between Dan in Durham Uni, Chrystalina Antonaides in Oxford, Claire McDonald and Nicola Pavese from Newcastle University, Louse Wiblin from South Tees NHSFT, James Fisher from Northumbria Healthcase NHSFT, Fionnuala Johnston from South Tyneside & Sunderland NHSFT and Boyd Ghosh in University Hospital Southampton NHSFT. We’ll also be working closely with Fiona Yelnoorkar and the NIHR RDN AGILE team, who will testing participants in thier homes or other community based settings.

The project aims to demonstrate that problems with visual search can be used to help with the diagnosis of PSP. Delayed diagnosis of PSP causes anxiety to patients, delays medical trials of new treatments and is costly for patients and the NHS. The results of our previous grant from the Vivensa foundation showed that the Bells test, a neuropsychological test usually used to screen for problems with attention, is also extremely accurate at classifying PSP and PD.  This result suggests that Bells test performance could be a cognitive marker for PSP. However, the specificity of this marker must be validated in a new sample of patients with confirmed PSP in order to progress to large scale evaluation of the test sensitivity, and ultimately a prospective trial. Validation is particularly important as PSP is a rare disease, meaning full-scale trials requiremany non-diseased patients and are very costly. In the longer term, faster and more accurate diagnosis of PSP will reduce the costs of multiple hospital visits for carers and the NHS, give certaintyto patients and carers, help ensure patients have access to appropriate care pathways and can be a key enabler of trials of new drugs to treat PSP.

The project is due to start in April 2026

Dan and Paul Burgum outside Durham Cathedral at Graduation 2025

Dan and Soazig went down to Durham Cathedral with a cohort of Psychology facuty to congratulate our students at this mornings (rather rainy) graduation ceremony. We were particularly delighted to share this special day with Dr Paul Burgum, who received his Ph.D for his Durham ARCTIC funded project “Resilient Polar Expedition Well-being: The Importance of Basic Psychological Needs” (supervised by Thuy-Vy Ngyuen, with Dan as second supervisor). Paul and Dan have worked together since Paul was awarded a Laidlaw Scholarship as an undergraduate, during which Paul conducted research on ultrarunning (Reduced mood variability is associated with enhanced performance during ultrarunnning | PLOS One) and it was fantastic to be there to celebrate this milestone with him. Congratulations to Paul and all our other graduates!

Psychology faculty on Palace Green, ready to congratulate our students on graduation day (L-R: Casteau, Boothroyd, Chan, Hodgetts, Pearson, Lane, Strickland, Spotorno, Chivers, Ellison)

Our grant from the Vivensa Foundation (formerly Dunhill Medical Trust) drew to a close last month and the project is now complete. We were delighted to successfully complete the project, but end of the grant is bittersweet, as we have said goodbye to Alexis, whose excellent work on the project was so vital to its successful delivery. We are currently writing the results up, but if you are interested you can find a summary of the project and our main findings by clicking HERE. Dan will also be presenting the findings at the Federation of European Neuropsychology Societies later this year. Unfortunately our application to the NIHR-EME scheme for a large-scale validitation study was unsuccessful, but we have other grant applications in the works and these will hopefully taking us a step closer to our goal of developing a new tool to help doctors make earlier and more accurate diagnosis of PSP.

The other exciting development is that Bobbi Chidley, who completed her MSc in Durham under the supervision of Soazig, will join the team to pursue a PhD exploring eye-movements and foraging behaviour in Parkinson’s disease. Bobbi will be supervised by Soazig, with Dan as second supervisor.

Durham research team on Alexis’ final day