Category: News and Blog

Term is well underway here in Durham and there was good news on a couple of fronts:  Soazig was appointed to the steering committee of the Visual Cognition Network and  we were joined by two Masters students (Stephen Tyson and Emma Brough). Stephen will be working on models of oculomotor control and Emma on neurodiversity in aesthetic appreciation. In addition, the second paper from the Vivensa Foundation grant finally came out in Brain Communications. This paper describes a profound deficit of visuospatial attention in people with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, and demonstrates that measures of search efficiency can discriminate between people with PSP and people with Parkinson’s disease with 90% accurcy. The full paper is here, available open access:

Visual search as a cognitive marker to discriminate progressive supranuclear palsy from Parkinson’s disease | Brain Communications | Oxford Academic

The timing was excellent, as the day after the paper came out he was down in London presenting the data at Neuro 20206 which is the annual PSPA / CurePSP joint conference (great hospitality and excellent talks). This also gave Dan the chance to do some networking and meet up with Chrystalina Antonaides and Boyd Gosch, who are PIs on the multi centre SpBellsPSP trial.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Speaking of SpBellsPSP, we also hit a major landmark as we passed the half-way stage of participant recruitement for people with Parkinson’s. A big thank you is due to all the sites in the NE who have been so good at recruting for us, and of course Caroline and the NIHR agile team who have been seeing the patients.

 

It has been a busy summer and I’m delighted to say that the SpBellsPSP project is finally open at all 6 of our NHS sites! It has been a long & complex process, and I’m very grateful for all the help we’ve had from our Research & Innovation Services here in Durham, and the R&D departments at the collaborating trusts. It also has be great working with Caroline Fletcher and the NENC RRDN Agile team, who have been very enthusiastic about the project and given some extremely valuable insights and feedback on the processes during our ‘shakeout’ meetings. It’s the first time I’ve  used REDcap (an NHS database system for storing research data) and the Agile team’s experience with this system has been invaluable in streamlining our processes. It’s been quite a long road to get here (we are a couple of months behind schedule), but hopefully all the preparatory work will mean the next phase goes very smoothly.

There was some other good news – we’ve been collaborating with Dr Ali Clarke and his Phd student Manjiri Bhat, who have applied their computational model of foraging behaviour (“FOMO”) to the data we collected as part of the Vivensa foundation project on attention and memory in PSP . Manjiri presented this work at European Conference of Visual Perception (ECVP) and Scottish Vision Group (SVG), winning the Best Talk award at both meetings!  In other conference news, Soazig presented some new findings on “Neurodiverse Gaze: Autistic Traits, Attention, and Context Effects in Art Appreciation” at the Visual Science of Art Conference (VSAC), and then whizzed over to Germany to present recent work on eye-movements and visual working memory. Bobbi also presented data on foraging behaviour in Parkinson’s disease, and Xueqing presented the latest findings from her PhD work on perceptual expertise in elite table tennis at the joint ESCoP-CoPM conference in Hangzhou.  Dan missed out on conferences this summer, but will present the findings from the Vivensa foundation project at the Neuro2026 PSP and CBD International Research Symposium in London later in the year

Finally, we welcomed Tilly Marsden on a 6 week internship funded by Durham Psychology Dept. Tilly has been collecting pilot data and and conducting a systematic review on the effect of eye movements on the vividness of imagery and we are looking forward to seeing the results soon.

 

 

Clarke, ADF. and Hughes, AE., (2026). FoMo: A unifying theory of visual foraging. PLoS Computational Biology. 22 (5), e1014266-e1014266

It has been a very busy few months! The biggest development was the favourable opinion from the NHS Research Ethics Committee for SpBellsPSP, and the confirmation of C&C  at the 1st two NHS sites. We also had a training session with the RRDN agile team, who came up with some great suggestions we’ve incorporated into the Bells test app, and so we are getting very close. We’re a little bit later than I’d hoped, but we are now on target to open by the end of the June, which is very exciting.

On the publication front we are waiting to hear back from Brain Communications after a revise and resubmit decision. This paper describes the key outcomes from Alexis’s project on visual search in PSP and Parkinson’s, and we’ve got our fingers crossed for a positive outcome. A second paper on User Perspectives on Prism glasses for rehabilitation of PSP was accepted by Journal of Visual Impairment, but unfortunately is stuck in a publication queue and is not slated to come out until August. You read a summary of this research here. TL:DR? Lots of people have tried prism glasses, not many people like them, but they might be helpful for eating and reading.

Bobbi Childley joined the project to do a PhD under the supervision of Soazig. Bobbi has made a great start, and will start working with people with Parkinson’s disease next week.

We were delighted to learn that Dan has £195,000 from the MRC Gap Fund to continue the work on cognition in PSP and Parkinson’s disease. The project “Validation of the Specificity of the Bells Test for Progressive Supranuclear Palsy”, is a multi-centre collaboration between Dan in Durham Uni, Chrystalina Antonaides in Oxford, Claire McDonald and Nicola Pavese from Newcastle University, Louse Wiblin from South Tees NHSFT, James Fisher from Northumbria Healthcase NHSFT, Fionnuala Johnston from South Tyneside & Sunderland NHSFT and Boyd Ghosh in University Hospital Southampton NHSFT. We’ll also be working closely with Fiona Yelnoorkar and the NIHR RDN AGILE team, who will testing participants in thier homes or other community based settings.

The project aims to demonstrate that problems with visual search can be used to help with the diagnosis of PSP. Delayed diagnosis of PSP causes anxiety to patients, delays medical trials of new treatments and is costly for patients and the NHS. The results of our previous grant from the Vivensa foundation showed that the Bells test, a neuropsychological test usually used to screen for problems with attention, is also extremely accurate at classifying PSP and PD.  This result suggests that Bells test performance could be a cognitive marker for PSP. However, the specificity of this marker must be validated in a new sample of patients with confirmed PSP in order to progress to large scale evaluation of the test sensitivity, and ultimately a prospective trial. Validation is particularly important as PSP is a rare disease, meaning full-scale trials requiremany non-diseased patients and are very costly. In the longer term, faster and more accurate diagnosis of PSP will reduce the costs of multiple hospital visits for carers and the NHS, give certaintyto patients and carers, help ensure patients have access to appropriate care pathways and can be a key enabler of trials of new drugs to treat PSP.

The project is due to start in April 2026

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!