Motor Bias Project

I had a very enjoyable trip up to Dundee to attend the joint Experimental Psychology Society / Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognive Science meeting at Dundee University, where I reported some of the reults of our Vivensa Foundation project on Cognition in PSP and Parkinson’s disease (summarised here). As a joint meeting the attendance was much bigger than i’m used to at EPS meetings, and as always with the EPS there was a rich variety of topics, with a good sprinkling of talks on attention, visual search and working memory (full programme is here) . My talk had a nice slot on Wednesday afternoon and there was a decent turn out, including Oculomotor Readiness Hypothesis guru Ray Klein. The talk was well received with some good points about the possible role of crowding in the search deficit experienced by PSP patients, and the role of working memory in complex cancellation tasks and the effect of dopmaine on visual search.

Durham colleagues Ziyi Wang and Linda Arrighi also gave very interesting talks on thier research projects, with Artie Graham presenting a poster on the effect of chemogenetic inactivation of the dorsolateral striatum on spatial learning in rats. I particularly enjoyed the 15-min presentation format of the morning sessions, which I thought was just right for giving a general audience a feel for the key insights without getting bogged down in details. I was also impressed with the catering at the coffee breaks, although unfortunatley missed the Wednesday wine reception! The ceidlih at the Apex hotel was enjoyable, although the heat made the dancing something of an endurace event. Dundee itself was very welcoming and the new developments on the waterfront gave it a very continental feel. There is also a very nice, flat 5k route along the banks of the Tay to Dundee airport, which I ran on Thursday afternoon, and treated myself to a cheeky ice-cream in the V&A musuem gardens to recover :-). Overall it was an excellent meeting and great opportunity to catch up with old psychology chums from the UK and Canada. Hats off to Lizzie Bradford for organising such an enjoyable meeting!