Experimental whisky tasting at SVG2023 Abertay (possibly a Taliksar, but none of us can remember…)
The last few weeks have been busy for the Motorbias project. Dan, Alexis, Siobhan and Soazig went up to Dundee to attend the Scottish Vison Group annual meeting at Abertay University. Siobhan gave a talk on resource allocation in during full and partial report tasks (now out in JoV) and Alexis presented a poster with some preliminary data from the PSP project. Dan and Soazig mainly schmoozed 😉. The programme was excellent, featuring a round table on the future of visual search, an excellent keynote on binocular by Tim Ledgeway from Nottingham (who also happened to be Dan’s internal examiner back in 2004!) and an interesting historical overview and demo of ‘binocular portraits’, which are 3D portraits viewed with a stereoscope, by Nick Wade. The Saturday scientific sessions were followed by experimental whisky tasting, which led to a few sore heads for the final day! Overall it was an very enjoyable meeting which felt a bit like a mini-ECVP.
Continuing the conference theme, Dan and Alexis were very pleased to have their symposium “Visual cognition and oculomotor control in neurodegenerative diseases” accepted at the 2023 Federation of European Societies of Neuropsychology in Thessalonkia (26th-29th Sept). They have a fantastic line-up of speakers, and the symposium will feature talks from Luca Wollenberg & motorbias project oldboy Thomas Schenk, who will describe recent developments in the understanding of the functioning of attentional mechanisms in the context of visually guided action, Trevor Crawford who will give an overview of 15 years of eye-tracking studies of working memory, attention and inhibitory control in Alzheimer’s disease, Chrystalina Antoniades who will explain how simple measures of oculomotor control can be used to diagnose and track the progression of Parkinson’s disease and Alexis, who will explain his current work exploring the potential for tests of visual cognition to facilitate differential diagnosis of PSP and PD.
Finally, after the good news about the PPI small grant we have started recruiting people for focus groups exploring how people with PSP feel about research involving prism glasses. We hope to run two sessions for 2-3 people with PSP and their partners/carers to get a feel for their priorities and ensure our research project reflects their needs. The first session will be online, so if you are interested in taking part please send an email to Dan (Daniel.smith2@durham.ac.uk)
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