Attention and memory in Progressive Supranuclear Palsy
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Attention and memory in people with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy
IRAS ID
163088
Contact name
Daniel Smith
Contact email
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 2 months, 1 days
Research summary
Scientists define attention as the ability to focus on the information that is relevant to your task while ignoring irrelevant information. Short-term memory is the ability to remember information for a few seconds (for example, a telephone number). Attention and short-term memory depend on the parts of the brain that control eye-movements. People with PSP have damage to these parts of their brain. We therefore predict that people with PSP will also have problems with attention and memory. We will test this prediction using three types of task. In the first task people with PSP must find a target among distracters. In the second task we will measure how quickly people with PSP react to the sudden appearance of a target. In the third task people with PSP will have to remember a sequence of locations. We expect that people with PSP will perform poorly on these tasks when compared to healthy people. This experiment will tell us new things about the problems faced by people with PSP. It will also help us to understand how attention works in healthy people.
REC name
North East - Newcastle & North Tyneside 1 Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
15/NE/0254
Date of REC Opinion
5 Oct 2015
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion