Sarah Wright’s PhD project was covered in local station CTV’s ‘Today in Canterbury’ News on 30th July:

The project was also covered in the Christchurch ‘Press’ here; in brief in the New Zealand Herald, Dominion Post, Otago Daily Times, and Gisborne Herald; and in a national radio interview with Larry Williams on NewsTalkZB.

PUBLICATIONS

Pritchard VE, Neumann E (in press). Avoiding the potential pitfalls of using negative priming tasks in developmental studies: Assessing inhibitory control in children. Developmental Psychology.

Van Hese P, Vanrumste B, Hallez H, Carroll GJ, Vonck K, Jones RD, Bones PJ, D’Asseler Y, Lemahieu I (in press). Detection of focal epileptiform events in the EEG by spatio-temporal dipole clustering. Clinical Neurophysiology.

Wolff M, Loukavenko E, Will BE, Dalrymple-Alford JC. (in press). The extended hippocampal-diencephalic memory system: Enriched housing promotes recovery of the flexible use of spatial representations after anterior thalamic lesions. Hippocampus.

CONFERENCES

Juliane Wilcke presented a poster at the 15^th annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in San Francisco, USA.

Wilcke JC, O’Shea RP, Watts R. (2008). Binocular rivalry: Structural connectivity and a truly nonrivalrous comparison condition. Annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, San Francisco, USA (12-15 April).

EVENTS

The Van der Veer Institute Brain Research Forum was held on Monday 7^th April, 2008 in the Beaven Lecture Theatre. Professor Tim David, Director for the Centre for Bioengineering, University of Canterbury presented “Auto-regulation models for perfusion of the cerebro-vasculature”.

GRANTS

Richard Jones, Govinda Poudel, Carrie Innes, Philip Bones, John Dalrymple-Alford, Fabio Babiloni, and Laura Astolfi have been advised of their having made it through to the Full Proposal stage with their Preliminary Research Proposal to the Marsden Fund for the study ‘Losing the struggle to stay awake: What happens in the brain during a lapse of responsiveness?’

Govinda Poudel received a $1500 grant-in-aid from the Maurice and Phyllis Paykel Trust to put towards his attendance at the 14^th Annual Meeting of the Organisation for Human Brain Mapping which will be held in Melbourne, Australia (June 15-19, 2008).

Govinda Poudel received a $2000 grant-in-aid from the University of Otago, Division of Health Sciences to put towards his attendance at the 30th IEEE International Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Conference which will be held in Vancouver, Canada (August 20-24, 2008).

GRADUATIONS

LiPyn Leow graduated on 18^th April with a PhD in Speech and Language Therapy from the Department of Communication Disorders at University of Canterbury. Her thesis was titled ‘Mechanisms of Airway Protection in Ageing and Parkinson’s Disease” and supervised by Maggie‑Lee Huckabee and Tim Anderson.

AWARDS

Mathieu Wolff, who spent 3 years as a post-doc until October 2007 with John Dalrymple-Alford’s group working on thalamus and memory, was ranked “first” in section 27 of the CNRS which is labelled “Comportement, Cognition, Cerveau” (behaviour, cognition, brain; effectively “behavioural and cognitive neuroscience”) when he applied for a highly prestigious research position as a “Chargé de Recherche” in the French national science research organisation (CNRS). The CNRS provide highly competitive tenured “research-only” positions. Mathieu will be working with Dr. Bruno Bontempi’s group in Bordeaux. Dr. Bontempi and Mathieu will continue to develop their collaborations with John Dalrymple-Alford, which is likely also to involve several other research groups with a view to learning the neuroscience correlates of recovery from memory loss after thalamic injury (Toulouse, Strasbourg, Cardiff, Dunedin).

APPOINTMENTS

Richard Jones has been invited and appointed to Co-chair the “Neural Engineering, Neuromuscular systems and Rehabilitation Engineering” Theme at the 30th IEEE International Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Conference in Vancouver, Canada (20-24 August, 2008). The conference is the world’s premier annual conference on biomedical engineering and the Society is the largest international society of biomedical engineers.

PUBLICITY

The NeuroTech Team was featured on TV ONE’s Close Up (14 Apr 2008) report on ‘Microsleeps’ – based upon the NeuroTech Team’s world-first functional image of what happens in the brain during a microsleep (via simultaneous-fMRI+EEG+Tracking+EyeMovements). The report can be viewed at: http://www.vanderveer.org.nz/media/index.php

PUBLICATIONS

Anderson NL, Hughes RN. (in press). Increased emotional reactivity in rats following exposure to caffeine during adolescence. Neurotoxicology and Teratology.

Pritchard VE, Neumann E, Rucklidge JJ. (in press). Selective attention and inhibitory deficits in ADHD: Does subtype or comorbidity modulate negative priming effects? Brain and Cognition.

Snell DL, Surgenor LJ, Hay-Smith J, Siegert R (in press). A systematic review of psychological treatments for mild traumatic brain injury: An update on the evidence. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology.

Will BE, Dalrymple-Alford JC, Wolff M, Cassel J-C. (in press). Reflections on the use of the concept of plasticity in neurobiology. Translation and adaptation by Bruno Will, John Dalrymple-Alford, Mathieu Wolff and Jean-Christophe Cassel from J. Paillard, J Psychol 1976;1:33-47. Behavioural Brain Research.

McKinlay A, Kaller C, Grace R, Dalrymple-Alford JC, Anderson T, Fink J, Roger D. (2008). Planning in Parkinson’s Disease: A Matter of Problem Structure? Neuropsychologia, 46: 384-9.

McKinlay A, Grace RC, Dalrymple-Alford JC, Anderson T, Fink J, Roger D (2008). A profile of neuropsychiatric problems and their relationship to quality of life for Parkinson’s disease patients without dementia. Parkinsonism & Related Disorders, 14: 37-42.

CONFERENCES

Wu B, Maclaren JR, Watts R, Millane RP, Bones PJ. “Ordered k-space acquisition in contrast enhanced magnetic resonance angiography (CE-MRA)”, presented as a poster at SPIE Medical Imaging Conference, San Diego, Feb 2008, MI01-27.

GRANTS

John Dalrymple-Alford received a grant of $4850 from the Psychology Department, University of Canterbury for the study “Developing new tests to begin answers: What does enrichment do that improves memory in rats with thalamic lesions?” The aim of the study is to develop procedures to examine neuronal complexity and neuronal activation in an animal model of recovery of function in the context of diencephalic amnesia.

John Dalrymple-Alford and Greg Crucian received a grant of $15,000 from the Psychology Department, University of Canterbury for the study “Towards combating Alzheimer’s disease: Enriched cognitive stimulation, improved brain function?” The aim of the study is to develop fMRI memory procedures in older adults to contribute to studies with Alzheimer patients.

Two pre-proposals to the Michael J Fox Foundation “for Parkinson’s Research Cognitive Deficits and Mood Disorders in Parkinson’s Disease 2008 program” have been invited to be submitted as full applications. These projects are:

1. Does amantadine improve cognition, apathy and mood in early PD? (Tim Anderson, John Dalrymple-Alford, Richard Watts, Greg Crucian, Richard Porter, Michael MacAskill).

2. Mild cognitive impairment to dementia in Parkinson’s disease: Variations in functional default-mode network and structural diffusion tensor brain imaging. (John Dalrymple-Alford, Tim Anderson, Richard Watts, Greg Crucian).

GRADUATIONS

Rati Bell graduated in absentia on the 27^th February 2008 with a Master of Science in Zoology (First Class Honours) from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Canterbury. Her thesis was titled “Anterior and lateral thalamic lesions in object-odour paired associate learning”.

PUBLICITY

The Christchurch Driving Research Programme featured in an item on Newstalk ZB (nationwide) on 5 Feb Jan 2008 (Richard Jones interviewed).

PEOPLE AT VDVI

Nadia Borlase commenced a 4th year project in Psychology at the University of Canterbury. Her project is titled “Volumetric medial temporal lobe measures and cognitive function in Parkinson’s disease” and will be supervised by John Dalrymple Alford, Tim Anderson, Greg Crucian, and Richard Watts.

Tracey Melzer commenced a PhD at the University of Otago, Christchurch. His project is titled “Structural and functional MR imaging in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease” and will be supervised by Tim Anderson and Michael MacAskill.

Amy Montagu commenced a 4th year project in Psychology at the University of Canterbury. Her project is titled “Memory for Temporal Order” and will be supervised by John Dalrymple-Alford, Greg Crucian, and Richard Watts. Amy will also be continuing work on the functional MRI-based project she completed as a University of Canterbury/CMRF Summer Student.