Question: S'up..........have you made any inventions? :P

Tom Hartley answered on 14 Jun 2010:

Hi Jade,

I invented a new memory test that uses computer generated pictures of landscapes like this. We wanted to measure how well people could recognize a place they had looked at before when it was seen from a different point of view. The new test was quite carefully made, so that people cannot use tricks to get the right answer, for example recognizing at a patch of shadow, or a patch of vegetation rather than the place itself – we changed all these things so they were no use. We found that people with damage to a part of the brain called the hippocampus were bad at recognizing the same place seen from a different point of view; they seem to have a particular problem with places as they were fine at recognizing non-spatial properties like the time of day or time of year depicted. We recently found that people with Alzheimer’s Disease (which tends to affect the hippocampus in the early stages of the illness) performed less well on the test than patients with another form of dementia. This could be useful because treatments that can alleviate some of the effects of Alzheimers conflict with those which help other types of dementia. I hope that my test might one day be used to help identify people with Alzheimer’s Disease in it’s earliest stages so that they can get the best possible treatment.