I’m delighted to say that, despite the challenges of coronavirus, 12 excellent papers have been published as part of our special issue of Cortex “Cognitive and Motor Processes in Visuospatial Attention”. Some of these papers draw on the work presented at our 2019 workshop, but there are also many excellent contributions from other scholars. The range and quality of the work is a testament to the resilience of all the contributors in the face of the huge challenges we faced during the last year, and we’re also very grateful to the many reviewers who made time in their packed schedules to provide thoughtful and constructive reviews. Many of the articles are available open access, as are the vast majority of the data, so you can even have a rummage around the raw data if you feel so inclined!
The articles fall into several broad categories. There are theoretical viewpoints papers from Olivers & Roelfsema on “Attention for action in visual working memory“, Tsotsos & colleagues on “On the control of attentional processes in vision“, and Redden, MacInnes and Klein on “Inhibition of return: An information processing theory of its natures and significance“. Neuroimaging papers explore the “Modulation of anticipatory visuospatial attention in sustained and transient tasks” (Di Russo et al.,) and demonstrate the existence of “Distinct saccade planning and endogenous visuospatial attention maps in parietal cortex: A basis for functional differences in sensory and motor attention” (Huddlestone and colleagues). Neuropsychological studies give new insight into the links between attention and motor control in a diverse range of disorders, including work on Optic Ataxia by Aguilar-Ros et al., Complex Regional Pain Syndrome by Ten Brink & colleagues, Developmental Coordination Disorder by Buckingham, Arthur & Harris, my own work with Soazig on Spatial attention and spatial short term memory in PSP and Parkinson’s disease, and Thomas and Karin’s paper on rehabilitation of Neglect . Experimental work is also well represented with papers by Kreyenmeier, Deubel and Hanning on “Theory of visual attention (TVA) in action: Assessing premotor attention in simultaneous eye-hand movements” and Aziz and colleagues on “Role of aging and working memory in performance on a naturalistic visual search task“. There are more papers in the pipeline and an editorial is on the way too, so keep an eye on our SI page!
Finally, I’d like to say a big thank you to Prof Sergio Della Salla, the EiC of Cortex, for giving us the chance to edit our own special issue, and Cheryl Philips for her invaluable assistance with the editorial process.
Dan
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.
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…