We were delighted that Soazig’s paper on the effects of context information on aesthetic appreciation was published in Journal of Vision: How does contextual information affect aesthetic appreciation and gaze behavior in figurative and abstract artwork? | JOV | ARVO Journals . The key finding was that giving people more information about an abstract painting encoraged them to enjoy it and explore it for longer. However, this effect was not seen when people looked at figurative paintings. This result suggests that the captions presented with paintings only enhance aesthetic experience when the meaning of an artwork is ambiguous, which is sometimes called an ‘elaboration effect’. Soazig is currently following up some of these ideas to see whether these effects generalise from the lab to a real gallery setting. We are also part of an exciting project led by Professor Andrew Beresford – Durham University using mobile eye-tracking to help the Bowes Museum understand how people explore thier galleries, and hope to be reproting back to the Bowes museum soon.

Soazig, Andy and the team at the Bowes Museum

We had some good news from the Dunhill Medical Trust, who kindly agreed to a short extension for Alexis’s funding that will keep him in Durham until May. This will allowed us complete the data collection from the age-matched control group and hopefully write up a few papers. Dan has also been busy building a team for next stage of the PSP research project. This will be an big, collaborative application the NIHR EME scheme involving partners in Newcastle, Oxford, Gateshead, Northumbria, Teesside and Sunderland. The primary goal will be to evaluate the diagnostic potential of the Bells test against current practice. The deadline for outline applications is 8th April, so please wish us luck!

Finally, the survey of how people with PSP use prism glasses we are doing with the PSPA went live in February. This is a follow-up of the survey we ran in 2020 (see User Perspectives on the Efficacy of Prism Therapy for PSP | Motor Bias Project), but this time targeted at people who received free prism glasses  from the PSPA (available by emailing helpline@pspassociation.org.uk). We hope this will tell us more about how people use prism glasses, and help understand how we can improve people’s experience of using them.

Alexis explaining our findings to ECVP 2024 in Aberdeen

The PSP project reached a major milestone this summer when Alexis reached our recruitment target of 27 participants with PSP and 27 with Parkinson’s disease. We are tremedously grateful to all the people who took time to volunteer for the project, to Susan Wilson, Bryony Storey, Faye Robinson and Angela Green in the NHS trusts who recruited patients at thier clinics and to Maria Rodrigues-Hancock from the Durham PSPA for helping us to reach out to people with PSP in County Durham. We are now in the final stages of recruitment for our group of age matched controls and hopeful to complete all data collection soon.

Alexis has also been been busy reporting the preliminary results at conference. He was invited to be part of a symposium on “Perception, cognition, and action in neuropsychological patients: Bridging science and practice” at the European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP), where he joined scholars from across europe to discuss how best to translate lab-based science into practical benefits for people with brain injuries. He will also be presenting our findings at Neuro 2024 in Toronto (Neuro2024: The PSP and CBD International Research Symposium – Campaign (curepsp.org)), and Dan will present the findings at the British Neuropsychological Society meeting in November.

Unfortunatley Dan was not successful with a grant application to support a PhD project examining the efficacy of prism glasses for people with PSP, but the hunt for funding goes on!

Siobhan giving her final presentation to the Psychology Dept. Slide shows an eccentricity effect in spatial STM

It has been a busy few weeks for the Motorbias project team. The really big news was that Siobhan submitted her PhD thesis and is looking forward to her viva later this summer. We were delighted that Profs David Pearson from Anglia Ruskin university agreed to be the external examiner, with Prof Alex Easton acting as internal examiner. Siobhan also gave her final talk to the department, and it was really great to see how the whole PhD fitted together.

Alexis giving his presentation at the wolfson ECR meeting

Alexis also gave talk this month, presenting some very promising looking preliminary data on the PSP project at the Wolfson Early Career Conference. He did a great job summarizing our rather complex project and coped well with some challenging questions from the audience. It was an ideal warm-up for FESN later this summer, where he’ll be presenting as part of a symposium on “Visual cognition and oculomotor control in neurodegenerative diseases”, alongside Dr Luca Wollenberg (Ludwig Maximilian University, Germany), Prof Trevor Crawford (Lancaster University, UK) and Prof Chrystalina Antoniades (Oxford University, UK)

Dan wearing prism glasses

There have also been some exiting developments with the PSP prism glasses project (User Perspectives on the Efficacy of Prism Therapy for PSP | Motor Bias Project), as Dan has started running the Patient and Public Involvement Studies with Susan Wilson from Sunderland Royal that will hopefully inform the development of a grant exploring whether prisms actually provide functional benefits for people with PSP. The PPI work has been quite a steep learning curve, and we’re very grateful to Jo and Alex from NIHR Research Design Service NE for their advice and support in organising these sessions!

As always Dan is very keen to hear from anyone with PSP who might be interested in helping us with PPI wor, or participating in Alexis’ research project Can cognitive tests differentiate PSP and Parkinson’s disease? | Motor Bias Project, if you are interested in either please email Dan (daniel.smith2@durham.ac.uk) or Alexis (alexis.cheviet@durham.ac.uk)