Ros Watling

Supervisors: Dr Gianna Cocchini, Dr Karina Linnell

My research interests concern visuospatial cognition, in particular the impairments found in neurological patients with spatially specific disorders of attention. The focus of my research is the process known as the grouping effect, by which visual extinction is found to be modulated when the contralesional and ipsilesional stimuli form a phenomenological unit. A number of researchers have suggested that incoming visuospatial information has direct access to long-term memory where it activates memory traces representing specific concepts that can be manipulated by working memory. My research aims to explore the relationship between visual extinction and memory, and to investigate the hypothesis that some forms of extinction may result from a defect in the visuospatial component of working memory.