Dan and Paul Burgum outside Durham Cathedral at Graduation 2025
Dan and Soazig went down to Durham Cathedral with a cohort of Psychology facuty to congratulate our students at this mornings (rather rainy) graduation ceremony. We were particularly delighted to share this special day with Dr Paul Burgum, who received his Ph.D for his Durham ARCTIC funded project “Resilient Polar Expedition Well-being: The Importance of Basic Psychological Needs” (supervised by Thuy-Vy Ngyuen, with Dan as second supervisor). Paul and Dan have worked together since Paul was awarded a Laidlaw Scholarship as an undergraduate, during which Paul conducted research on ultrarunning (Reduced mood variability is associated with enhanced performance during ultrarunnning | PLOS One) and it was fantastic to be there to celebrate this milestone with him. Congratulations to Paul and all our other graduates!
Psychology faculty on Palace Green, ready to congratulate our students on graduation day (L-R: Casteau, Boothroyd, Chan, Hodgetts, Pearson, Lane, Strickland, Spotorno, Chivers, Ellison)
Our grant from the Vivensa Foundation (formerly Dunhill Medical Trust) drew to a close last month and the project is now complete. We were delighted to successfully complete the project, but end of the grant is bittersweet, as we have said goodbye to Alexis, whose excellent work on the project was so vital to its successful delivery. We are currently writing the results up, but if you are interested you can find a summary of the project and our main findings by clicking HERE. Dan will also be presenting the findings at the Federation of European Neuropsychology Societies later this year. Unfortunately our application to the NIHR-EME scheme for a large-scale validitation study was unsuccessful, but we have other grant applications in the works and these will hopefully taking us a step closer to our goal of developing a new tool to help doctors make earlier and more accurate diagnosis of PSP.
The other exciting development is that Bobbi Chidley, who completed her MSc in Durham under the supervision of Soazig, will join the team to pursue a PhD exploring eye-movements and foraging behaviour in Parkinson’s disease. Bobbi will be supervised by Soazig, with Dan as second supervisor.
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.
Autumn has arrived and with it a flurry of activity on our prism glasses project. We’ve submitted a research paper describing the results of our prism glasses survey which combined the data from our original research (see HERE for a summary) with some new data collected by Alexis as part of the Dunhill Medical Trust study. We are hopeful for some kind reviews! We’ve also been progressing with our PPIE work, and the PSP Association were kind enough to invite Dan to thier PRIM group meeting. The meeting produced some really interesting insights, and we’ll be taking those on board as we revise our research plan. Something else that became very clear from both our research paper and meetings with patients and carers is that there is very little information out there about which prism glasses might be useful for PSP, so we’ve added a bit more information about different prism types to our website. To get a more direct experience, Dan ordered some prism glasses and has been wearing around the house to see how they feel (he reports it makes it very hard to take a good selfie…). We’ve also had meetings with Prof Chrystalina Antonaides (Oxford) and Dr Lisa Alcock (Newcastle) to take the first steps towards a collaborative project looking at whether prism glasses might help with mobility and we are hoping to arrange a second survey study of prism glasses with the PSP Association.
Progress also continues with the Dunhill Medical Trust project on attention and memory in PSP. Alexis is contining to recruit people for his age matched control group, and presented a poster showing that people with PSP have a profound deficit of visual search at Neuro 2024 in Toronto (although he nearly didn’t make it after his flight got cancelled at the last minute!). Dan will present these results at the upcoming meeting of the British Neuropsychological Society in London later in November.
Alexis explaining our findings to ECVP 2024 in Aberdeen
The PSP project reached a major milestone this summer when Alexis reached our recruitment target of 27 participants with PSP and 27 with Parkinson’s disease. We are tremedously grateful to all the people who took time to volunteer for the project, to Susan Wilson, Bryony Storey, Faye Robinson and Angela Green in the NHS trusts who recruited patients at thier clinics and to Maria Rodrigues-Hancock from the Durham PSPA for helping us to reach out to people with PSP in County Durham. We are now in the final stages of recruitment for our group of age matched controls and hopeful to complete all data collection soon.
Alexis has also been been busy reporting the preliminary results at conference. He was invited to be part of a symposium on “Perception, cognition, and action in neuropsychological patients: Bridging science and practice” at the European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP), where he joined scholars from across europe to discuss how best to translate lab-based science into practical benefits for people with brain injuries. He will also be presenting our findings at Neuro 2024 in Toronto (Neuro2024: The PSP and CBD International Research Symposium – Campaign (curepsp.org)), and Dan will present the findings at the British Neuropsychological Society meeting in November.
Unfortunatley Dan was not successful with a grant application to support a PhD project examining the efficacy of prism glasses for people with PSP, but the hunt for funding goes on!
