Easter term has seen Alexis making excellent progress with the PSP project. We are now well on course to hit our target of 27 people in the PSP group and can turn our thoughts to recruiting some age matched controls. Dan also presented some preliminary data from the visual search task at the PSP Association Research Information Day on 23rd of May. His talk and many other fascinating presentations can be found on the PSPA webpage: Research Information Events – PSPA (pspassociation.org.uk). We also submitted an application to the Ulverscroft Foundation for a PhD project that (if we’re successful) will follow up our pilot project that explored the experiences of people with PSP when using prism glasses.
There was some good news for Soazig, who had a paper on the effect of labelling on aesthetic appreciation and gaze behaviour accepted in a special issue of Journal of Vision. It was also exciting to start a new project with Prof Andy Beresford from MLAC and the Bowes Museum which uses mobile eye tracking to help evaluate visitors’ experiences of the 2nd floor galleries of the Museum. Two of our psych graduates (Lucy Edgar and Catherine Guo) have temporarily joined us to run the project, which will take place over the next month and will be complemented by a lab-based study run by Flora Loh.
Lucy, Catherine, Soazig & Andy at the Bowes Museum ready to begin the eye-tracking study
Xueqing has completed the first experiments of her PhD project exploring perceptual expertise in table-tennis players. As predicited, experts were better at predicting the landing position of a table-tennis shot, particularly at early occlusion intervals. However, this advantage depends on the stroke type, and, rather surprisingly, experts were much slower at responding than novice players. Having aced her progression viva, Xueqing is now heading off to China to recruit a large sample of elite table-tennis players to follow this finding up in a larger sample.
We are now looking forward to summer conference season. Xueqing has already presented her first experiment at the RIO group meeting in Liverpool and Dan and Soazig will be going to the Experimental Psychology Society meeting in York. Dan will present some new data on how presaccadic attention and memory based attention interact during actions, and Soazig will describe the preliminary findings of a TMS study that examines the effect of FEF neurostimulation on premotor attention shifts. Later in the summer Soazig will present at the Visual Science of Art Conference (VSAC) and European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP) in Aberdeen. Alexis will also be at ECVP, having been invited to contribute to a symposium on “Perception, Cognition and Action in Neuropsychological Patients: Bridging Science and Practice” organised by Jutta Billino & Jennifer Randerath. It is going to be a busy summer!
downwards, which makes it hard for them to see what is happening in the lower visual field. Many everyday tasks like eating, reading and using a computer rely on being able to look down into the lower part of the visual field, which makes them very difficult for people with PSP. Prism glasses bend the light so that that the lower visual field can be seen without having to move the eyes. They are cheap and easy to use, so appear to have great potential as a compensatory tool. They are widely used to treat other neurological disorders which affect vision, such has hemispatial neglect and 
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 😉.