Tag Archives: spatial attention

Ready for EPS Online!

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We’re all very excited about EPS online next week. We’ve got posters from Dan, Soazig and Siobhan uploaded to the OSF site and presentations from Siobhan and Dan (whose talk is much too long at 8mins, but some just people love the sound of thier own voice 😉 ). It’ll be our first online conference so not really sure what to expect, but hopefully we can foward to some lively discussions!

Soazig’s poster describes some work we did with an excellent group of dissertation students, whose project explored  the impact of holding things in WM on presaccadic attention. The take-home here is that we got some nice interference effects, suggesting some shared control between presaccadic attention and VWM: https://osf.io/djrvz/

Siobhan’s poster outlines the first complete experiment from her PhD, which was a conceptual replication of Schneegans & Bayes (2016) study that argued for a resource model of spatial working memory. She replicated the basic finding, but the devil is in the detail, as excluding trials with eye-movements produces some interesting changes to the modelling https://osf.io/nphqv/

Dan’s poster argues that a classic claim in cognitive psychology (that eogenous attention gradually accumulates at a cued location) is probably wrong, and instead argues that exogenous attention is fully deployed by at least 30ms after cue onset  https://osf.io/tn3gz/

Finally, if you’re interested in social attention you should check out Dr Emma Morgan’s poster showing how autistic traits modulate the effects of mental state attribution on gaze cueing /https://osf.io/ud2yz/.

Hope you enjoy our posters and talks, we’ll be available for discussion via twitter if you have any questions: @AttentionLab, @SoazigCasteau, @SiobhanMcateer4

Reflections on Bianca de Haan’s seminar “Selective Attention in Multi-Target Environments”

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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…

You can find out more about Bianca’s research here: https://www.brunel.ac.uk/people/bianca-de-haan

 

Federation of European Neuropsychology Societies 2019: Conference Report

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In my final conference of a busy summer I attended the Federation of European Neuropsychology Societies (FESN) which took place from 5th -7th September in Milan. I arrived on the 4th and stayed in the conference hotel “Palazzo Delle Stellene” which was a converted monastery right beside the church that houses Michelangelo’s Last Supper. The hotel was very atmospheric, although the plumbing was a bit noisy and there was a long queue for the single coffee machine at breakfast! The talks on the first day didn’t start until lunchtime, so after breakfast I strolled down to the Piazza del Duomo to take the obligatory selfie at both ends of the square for use in lectures on neglect 😉 .

Looking across the Piazza Del Duomo from the steps of the Duomo

The conference itself was hosted in the Universita Cattolica del Sacro Coure, which is  housed in the cloisters of the beautiful old monastery of Sant’Ambrogio. The main auditorium (Aula Magna) was richly decorated, as was the Crypt, which held some of the other sessions. This grandeur did come at a cost, as the rooms tended to be long and narrow which wasn’t brilliant for their acoustics and meant it could be hard to read detail on some slides. The opening address was an interesting and unusually political appeal to science administrators and governments to protect researchers doing animal work. It was followed by a keynote from Emrah Duzel explaining the functional anatomy of episodic memory loss in Alzhiemers disease, then lunch in the grounds. After lunch I attended the ‘Body in the Brain’ symposium, which discussed recent developments in the understanding of embodiment and then an excellent session on networks of attentional control chaired by Alfredo Spanga. My main take homes from this session were that the old idea that the right hemisphere is specialised for spatial attention has really stood the test of time, but also that people in this field really neglect the role of the oculomotor system in visuospatial attention.  

Looking along the cloisters

Speaking of attention and eye-movements, my talk was on ‘Associations and dissociations between oculomotor readiness and covert attention’ and was part of a Colloquium organised by Thomas Schenk. As the talks was only 15 mins I covered our the studies on attention within and beyond the range of eye movements we recently published in Cortex (Casteau & Smith 2018) and only touched on the broader literature, which we reviewed in Casteau & Smith (2019). I was more nervy than usual about this talk, partly because it was in Italy, which I think of as the home of Premotor theory, and partly because I knew several of my old bosses (Thomas and Steve Jackson) would be there and I wanted to put on a good show. Unfortunately I was last in the evening session so attendance was a wee bit sparse, but in the end I think it went quite well, and I got some good questions from Steve and Janet Bultitude afterwards. The other speakers were Ana Chica, who gave a very nice talk on the motoric and perceptual effects of Inhibition of Return, Christian Poth who demonstrated that there is some trans-saccadic competition between unattended objects and Karin Ludwig, who reported experiments showing that visual scanning training can bias attention in healthy participants. In the following days I attended some fascinating talks on Neglect in the symposium organed by Monika Harvey and saw a superb keynote from Carlo Miniussi on the challenges of applying neurostimulation techniques such as tDCS to neurorehabilitation. Masud Husain also gave an excellent talk on apathy, showing that in many cases the core problem is that patients are not motivated by outcomes with high rewards. I also attended the poster sessions, but as these were only an hour long and over lunch I didn’t see as many as I would have liked. There was some excellent work, and I particularly enjoyed Monika Halika’s poster “Disputing neglect-like symptoms in unilateral chronic pain” which showed there is no unilateral attentional bias in chronic pain patients with upper limb pain using a TOJ task. 

I had not been to FESN before and I thought there were some interesting comparisons between it and ECEM, which Soazig & I had attended earlier in the summer (you can read a report here). The

The Aula Magna, viewed from the stage. There were a few more people by the time my talk started!

meetings felt of a similar size, with around 400-500 delegates and this gave them both a feeling of intimacy and offered excellent opportunities for catching up with friends and colleagues and meeting new people. If anything FESN offered me more opportunities for ‘networking’ (as opposed to gossiping with old friends). A nice example of this was probably the couple of hours I spent in the company of Thomas and Sergio Della Salla, listening to them discuss the state of academic publishing. It was interesting to hear a perspective from ‘inside’ the industry (Thomas is former section editor for Neuropsychologia and Sergio the EiC of Cortex). It was also a salutatory lesson in the power of personal contact; for some time I’ve harboured an ambition to edit a special issue but not really known how to go about it. I tentatively mentioned this to Sergio, only to have him beckon seductively while crooning ‘send it to me…’. So, watch this space!  The conference registration fee was quite high at 400 euro for early, non-members, but as with ECEM this included excellent plentiful lunches and a welcome reception. Although the meeting was intimate it felt a bit more formal than ECEM, with many delegates adopting a ‘smart causal’ look or even suits, despite the warm weather. The talks themselves also tended to have a more sober delivery, perhaps as Christian Poth suggested, because many of the delegates were also clinicians and were discussing research related to their own patients.

Overall I thought it was an excellent meeting with a very high standard of talk. The highlight was probably Miniussi’s talk on tDCS, although I was also very tickled when Radek Ptak approached Thomas and I saying “Hey! You’re the Premotor Theory guys!”. I would definitely consider attending FESN again and it would be an excellent forum to present the results from our more applied neuropsychological work on Attention & Memory in Progressive Supranuclear Palsy and Parkinson’s Disease (e.g. Smith & Archibald 2019) .

Casteau, S. & Smith, D.T. (2019). Associations and Dissociations between Oculomotor Readiness and Covert Attention. Vision 3(2): 17
Casteau, S. & Smith, D.T. (2018). Covert Attention Beyond the Range of Eye-movements: Evidence for a Dissociation between Exogenous and Endogenous orienting. Cortex

Talk at PSYPAG 2019

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A couple of weeks ago I was invited down to Sheffield to present an overview of our recent findings to the PsyPAG annual conference. PsyPAG is the official postgraduate section of the BPS and covers all aspects of applied and academic psychology, so although I was part of the ‘Cognitive’ stream, I thought I should try and make my talk a bit broader than the usual premotor-theory bashing schtick Soazig and I indulge in. I took some inspiration from a talk Ray Klein gave in Durham a few years back  where he talked about oculomotor readiness theories in terms of embodied cognition, and from the recent RIO group meeting I attended, where Dan Eaves and I discussed the many similarities between motor theories of attention and motor theories of imagery. I was keen to mention some recent data on spatial working memory in Progressive Supranuclear Palsy and framing the talk in the broad terms of ‘visual cognition’ gave me licence to talk about a wider range of topics than just Premotor theory. With this theme I managed to touch on our earlier work with Case A.I, some eye-abduction data, Soazig’s recent data on search and cueing beyond the Effective Oculomotor Range and a bit on PSP. In the end I think this approach was quite successful at keeping people engaged with the talk, with lots of people nodding and nobody frowning too much! Interestingly, the questions were really focused on the applications of the research to different disorders, such as ADHD. On reflection, I think offering a more thorough discussion of the potential applications of our project in terms of rehab. For example, touching the kind of work Joris Elshout is doing in the Utrecht leg of the project, might have been a good idea. At the end of the talk I was surprised and delighted to be given some mementos of the occasion, which were only slightly awkward to carry back on the train 😉.  If you are interested in seeing the slides, they can be found here: “Are cognitive processes embodied in the motor system?”

Around my talk I had an enjoyable time looking through the many and varied posters. My favourite was from Gabriele Pesimena that examined to what extent perspective taking was disrupted by changes to the perspective of the avatar. Pleasingly, changing perspective had no effect, just as Geoff Cole had shown a couple of years ago! Many other posters utilised eye-tracking in one way or another, and this technique really seems to be becoming commonplace (although TBH in some cases it wasn’t always clear why eye-tracking was being used). There was also time to catch a couple of talks, and I particularly enjoyed Ben Butterworth (a Durham Psychology alumni) outlining the challenges of his research on the effects of alcohol on memory performance, and Suzy Hodgson’s talk on the roles new fathers play and how they interact with heath services. The talk sessions were very good with a really enthusiastic and engaged audience. There was also an excellent lunch, although I had a slightly awkward moment when I got shooed away from some very tasty cakes which apparently belonged to a different conference! However, all was not lost, as I subsequently discovered the Psychology cakes in the poster session 😊. I also bumped into Ellen Ridley, who was receiving a Masters award for her research at Durham and offered her my congratulations. I really enjoyed the conference and would definitely recommend it to any psychology postgrads looking for an opportunity to share their work in progress and gain experience giving talks. Its also worth noting that PsyPAG  offers many awards and small grants that can really help PGR develop their careers Finally, I would like to thank Suzanne Hodgson for the invitation to give the keynote.

Dan Smith