We’re delighted to announce that the journal “Cortex” has agreed to host a special issue based around the Symposium on “Cognitive & Motor Processes in Visual Attention” we hosted in Durham earlier this year! The SI will be edited by Dan, Soazig, Stefan and Thomas and is a really exciting opportunity to share work on the relationship between cognition and motor control. The call for papers and SI description is below and is available on the Cortex website . The submission portal will open on 15th February and close on 15th July.
The ability to orient attention in space is fundamental to our ability to successfully interact with our environment, as demonstrated by the profound problems experienced by patients with neuropsychological deficits of attention. Understanding the mechanisms of attentional orienting has been central question in cognitive neuropsychology, and although much progress has been made some important questions remain unanswered. For example, there is broad agreement that there is some relationship between the motor processes involved in the control of eye-movements and the cognitive processes involved in attentional selection. However, the precise nature of this relationship remains controversial, with some scholars arguing for an almost complete functional overlap, others arguing for complete functional dissociation and a variety of views between these poles. Furthermore, the interplay between visuospatial working memory, visuospatial attention and oculomotor control is not well understood, despite great progress in understanding the neural and cognitive mechanisms of each individual processes. Finally, it is not clear to what extent the theoretical advances in understanding the interactions between spatial attention and oculomotor control can be used inform the development of new therapies for neuropsychological disorders such as hemianopia and neglect. This special issue will bring together empirical and review articles that offer new insights into the functional role of attentional and motor systems in cognitive processes, and/or seek to apply the principles that govern the relationship between attention, memory and motor control to solving applied questions relating to the clinical diagnosis and rehabilitation of neuropsychological disorders.
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…
We’re delighted to welcome Siobhan McAteer to the lab! Siobhan arrives from Oxford, where she has just completed an MSc in Psychological Research. Her project “How do we store spatial working memories?” will examine the role of the eye movement system in spatial working memory with a view to applying resource theories of visual short-term memory (e.g. Bays & Husain, 2008) to spatial working memory. Siobhan’s research is supported by an ESRC NINEDTP doctoral scholarship and she will be 2nd supervised by Dr Anthony McGregor. Welcome (back) to Durham Siobhan!
ty. Now, imagery isn’t our usual sort of thing, but the chance to attend a free conference in our own backyard seemed to good to miss. On day 1 we saw some fascinating presentations from students in Shaun Boe’s lab who had travelled all the way from Dalhousie in Canada. The first thing to note is that most of the contemporary research was focused on AOMI (which everyone pronounced AY-OH-ME, much to Soazigs irritation). AOMI involves action observation (i.e. watching an expert do the task) while simultaneously engaging in mental imagery (imagining performing the action). The key message I took from these talks was that although it was generally agreed that mental imagery was jolly helpful for improving skills, there was no real agreement about either the optimal ‘dosage’ or at what point during skill acquisition AOMI was most effective. Boe’s group showed some pretty nice evidence that AOMI was most effective during skill acquisition; the ‘cognitive’ and ‘associative’ phases in Fitts & Posner (1967) model of expertise. In a particularly interesting finding, Sarah Kraeutner argued that imagery could reduce endpoint variability without necessarily improving overall accuracy in a dart throwing task. However, a number of audience members commented that although the dart-throwing paradigm is a classic task, it has problems as a model of skill acquisition, particularly with respect to controlling prior experience of the task. Also in this session was a fascinating talk from Jack Binks on using
imagery to rehabilitate motor skills after stoke. Richard Ramsay then gave an eclectic keynote covering cognitive and brain mechanisms of social perception, which I found particularly interesting with respect to our work with Geoff Cole on perspective taking and 
rt to reconcile or integrate these views, and we agreed this could be an area that is ripe for further study. The day 2 keynote was given by Robert Hardwick (KU Leuven), who presented a fascinating meta-analysis of studies examining imagery, action observation and action execution, and finished with an appeal to develop more theoretically principled models of mental imagery. Again, I was struck by the parallels between the dominance of Simulation Theory in the motor imagery literature and that of OMRH/PMT in the literature on spatial attention, and the need to develop beyond these ideas. There was also time for a bit of light schmoozing around the posters, and I was delighted to talk briefly with Zoe Franklin about TMS and eyetracking, Elaine Poliakoff about her work on imagery in Parkinsons Disease, Shaun Boe about his ideas on the neural and cognitive mechanisms underpinned AOMI, Gabriel Valadez Roque about using imagery to rehabilitate stroke patients in Mexico and Martin Edwards, with whom I mainly exchanged academic gossip 😉.