We’re
delighted to welcome Dr Alexis Cheviet to the team! Alexis joins us from INSERM in Lyon where he worked on oculomotor function in people with brain injuries with Prof Denis Pelisson, and will lead on the Dunhill Medical Trust project examining attention and memory in Progressive Supranuclear Palsy and Parkinson’s disease. Welcome to Durham Alexis!
Category: News and Blog
Update on our special issue of Cortex: “Cognitive and Motor Processes in Visuospatial Attention”
I’m delighted to say that, despite the challenges of coronavirus, 12 excellent papers have been published as part of our special issue of Cortex “Cognitive and Motor Processes in Visuospatial Attention”. Some of these papers draw on the work presented at our 2019 workshop, but there are also many excellent contributions from other scholars. The range and quality of the work is a testament to the resilience of all the contributors in the face of the huge challenges we faced during the last year, and we’re also very grateful to the many reviewers who made time in their packed schedules to provide thoughtful and constructive reviews. Many of the articles are available open access, as are the vast majority of the data, so you can even have a rummage around the raw data if you feel so inclined!
The articles fall into several broad categories. There are theoretical viewpoints papers from Olivers & Roelfsema on “Attention for action in visual working memory“, Tsotsos & colleagues on “On the control of attentional processes in vision“, and Redden, MacInnes and Klein on “Inhibition of return: An information processing theory of its natures and significance“. Neuroimaging papers explore the “Modulation of anticipatory visuospatial attention in sustained and transient tasks” (Di Russo et al.,) and demonstrate the existence of “Distinct saccade planning and endogenous visuospatial attention maps in parietal cortex: A basis for functional differences in sensory and motor attention” (Huddlestone and colleagues). Neuropsychological studies give new insight into the links between attention and motor control in a diverse range of disorders, including work on Optic Ataxia by Aguilar-Ros et al., Complex Regional Pain Syndrome by Ten Brink & colleagues, Developmental Coordination Disorder by Buckingham, Arthur & Harris, my own work with Soazig on Spatial attention and spatial short term memory in PSP and Parkinson’s disease, and Thomas and Karin’s paper on rehabilitation of Neglect . Experimental work is also well represented with papers by Kreyenmeier, Deubel and Hanning on “Theory of visual attention (TVA) in action: Assessing premotor attention in simultaneous eye-hand movements” and Aziz and colleagues on “Role of aging and working memory in performance on a naturalistic visual search task“. There are more papers in the pipeline and an editorial is on the way too, so keep an eye on our SI page!
Finally, I’d like to say a big thank you to Prof Sergio Della Salla, the EiC of Cortex, for giving us the chance to edit our own special issue, and Cheryl Philips for her invaluable assistance with the editorial process.
Dan
Special Issue Deadline Extended to 31st July
We’ve had a lot of interest in the special issue (thank you everyone!) and given the challenges facing our community following the lockdowns across the world we have decided to extend the deadline for our Special Issue of Cortex “Cognitive and Motor Processes in Visuospatial Attention” until the 31st July 2020. The full call for papers can be found below, we looking forward to seeing some great work!
Is preattentive search constrained by the oculomotor system?
Yes. At least, that’s what we claim in the latest paper from the Durham arm of the MotorBias project, which has now been accepted for a special issue of Attention, Perception & Psychophysics honouring Anne Triesman. In this study we explored what happened to visual search when we presented search arrays at positions that can be seen but are beyond the Effective Oculomotor Range (EOMR; ie. positions that could not be reached with saccadic eye movement). In short, we found that preattentive, feature search was significantly impaired but conjunction search was not. The twist on our previous projects which used cueing tasks (e.g. Casteau & Smith 2020) or the eye-abduction technique (Smith et al., 2014) was that we parametrically varied the eccentricity of the search array across 6 different positions. This meant we could precisely localise the eccentricity at which feature search became impaired in relation to each participants EOMR. Critically, the drop in feature search performance occurred when the arrays were moved from just within the range of eye-movements to just beyond the range of eye-movements, and was stable at more eccentric locations (see figure 1) . The latter finding is important, as it mean we can rule out the possibility that people simply got worse at search tasks as stimuli are presented further into the periphery.
It therefore seems that the EOMR imposes a significant constraint on the ability to reflexively orient to salient stimuli, but not on the voluntary shifts of attention associated with conjunction or ‘attentive’ search. This pattern of data is echoes our other findings (reviewed in Casteau & Smith 2019), and is consistent with the broader claim that Oculomotor theories of spatial attention such as OMRH and Premotor Theory are only tenable for exogenous, covert orienting. Thanks to the ESRC and Durham University the paper is open access, and you can read it by clicking here
Research featured in PSPMatters magazine
The PSP Association were kind enough to publish a short article about our new Dunhill Medical Trust project exploring “Can tests of cognitive function help diagnose PSP?”. You can also read the article with a nice picture here (page 15)
I first heard about PSP as a graduate student when I read a paper describing an unusual and devastating disease characterised by paralysis of the eyes. The paper reported a striking result: people with PSP had a problem moving attention that was not experienced by people with Parkinson’s disease. At the time I was doing my doctoral research and the result seemed to have profound implications for our theoretical understanding of attention. I didn’t realise at this time was that it might also be important for the purposes of diagnosis. I was keen to explore how PSP affected attention further, but unfortunately due to the rarity of the condition we had no luck finding participants. At this point end I moved on to working with stroke survivors. However, as my career progressed I often thought about the condition, and one day happened to mention it to Dr Neil Archibald, consultant neurologist at James Cook University Hospital. He had a particular interest in PSP and was keen to collaborate. He put me in touch with the PSP Association, and together we ran a workshop with patients, carers, clinicians and academics to generate research ideas.
One issue that was important to everyone was diagnosis. Because PSP is rare and shares many symptoms with Parkinson’s disease, a great many PSP patients are misdiagnosed. This is distressing to patients and carers and can lead to unnecessary prescription of medications with potentially harmful side effects. Out of the workshop emerged an idea for a pilot study comparing mental functions such as attention and memory in people with PSP and Parkinson’s disease, with the long- term aim of evaluating whether such tests could be useful for diagnosis. Over the next 2 years we recruited a group people with PSP and another group of people with Parkinson’s disease. We asked them to do computer tasks that tested their eye-movements, attention and short-term memory. The results of the pilot study were clear: People with PSP could not make any up or down eye-movements, and their left and right eye-movements were also affected. Importantly, we found impairments in attention and memory that seemed to correlate with the eye-movement problems. These results were very promising, and the Dunhill Medical Trust subsequently agreed to fund a 3-year project designed to develop a more complete understanding of how PSP affects visual cognition. This project will begin next year, and we hope it will bring us a step closer to finding a cheap, effective and reliable tool for the early diagnosis of PSP.