Motor Bias Project

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.