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.
Xueqing presenting some data from her PhD research examining perceptual expertise in elite table tennis players
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
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