Shannon Dickson

Assistant Psychologist & Research Coordinator

Research in attention, memory and motivation in healthy people and patients with Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, stroke and vascular dementia.

Background

I joined Dr Husain's Cognitive Neurology group in 2019. Our research focuses on fundamental cognitive processes such as attention, memory, decision-making, and how this is affected by motivation. Healthy people experience problems with these processes to an extent, but for some people with neurological disease it can be profound. We investigate the mechanisms underlying these difficulties in Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's Disease, stroke and vascular dementia. We hope to develop new avenues for treatment.

Prior to this, I completed my undergraduate studies in Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. I led a project on attention network deficits in Parkinson's Disease patients with hallucinations. During this time I was a Research Assistant for the CoPAN research group at Universiteit Leiden, and for the Memory Lab at the University of Auckland.

Since graduating in 2016 I have been a Statistician for the University of Edinburgh Careers Service and an Evaluation Officer in the third sector. My interests span neurological and psychiatric disease in addition to data analysis and programming.