There has been a growth in students with dyslexia attending university. These students commonly rate writing as one of their greatest problem areas. Our research set out to describe the effects of dyslexia on the writing skills of students compared to age-matched peers and a spelling-skill-matched group. Generally, the texts of the students with dyslexia were poorer than age controls but not poorer than the spelling-skill controls. However, there were no major differences in "higher order" skills such as ideas and organization with the chronological age controls, only in "lower order" transcription skills such as spelling and handwriting fluency. The students with dyslexia made more spelling errors in their essays than one would predict given their dictated spelling skills.

(J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry 2001;70:727-733)

Considering the implicit nature of representational momentum and its modifiability, the findings suggest that higher-order semantic information can act on secondary visual cortex to alter perception without explicit awareness.

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Patients with PD with VHs have substantially greater impairment of inhibitory ability than patients without VHs. These findings support interactive models of the genesis of visual hallucinations in PD.

We report two functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments which reveal similarities and differences between perceptual and imaginal networks within the single visual submodality of colour. The first experiment contrasted viewing of a coloured and grey-scale Mondrian display, while the second contrasted a relative colour judgement with a spatial task and required the generation of mental images. Our results show that colour perception activates the posterior fusiform gyrus bilaterally (area V4), plus right-sided anterior fusiform and lingual gyri, striate cortex (area V1), and the left and right insula. Colour imagery activated right anterior fusiform gyrus, left insula, right hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus, but not V4 or V1. The findings reconcile neurological case studies suggesting a double dissociation between deficits in colour imagery and perception and point to anterior fusiform, parahippocampal gyri and hippocampus as the location for stored representations of coloured objects.