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Staff Profile

Dr Scott McDonald

Senior Lecturer in Psychology of Ageing

Background

I originally completed a degree in Medical Biochemistry, and then a PhD in experimental psychology, with a primary emphasis on visual psychophysics. During post-doctoral research, I used functional magnetic resonance imagining and neurophysiology to investigate visual processing and later behavioural paradigms to investigate whisker sensory processing and decision making in rodents. 

I then retrained to be a Clinical Neuropsychologist, in Australia, and was employed in hospital and clinical environments. This included helping to set up the Wicking Institute’s ISLAND Clinic – a memory and dementia clinic – at the University of Tasmania.

Research

I am interested in the role of neuropsychological investigation and assessment in the diagnosis and prognosis of dementia, and developing therapies for people with mild cognitive impairment. Themes for my research include:

- Improving diagnostic accuracy in dementia and characterising the cognitive profile changes in dementia

- Understanding and mitigating the role of stress in assessment, particularly verbal memory assessment

- The usefulness of clinical expertise and learning in the context of diagnostic judgments

- Understanding “non-pathological” long-term brain and cognitive changes in people as they age

- Effective short-term therapeutic interventions for people with Mild Cognitive Impairment


Publications

  • Articles

    • Alty J, Goldberg LR, Roccati E, Lawler K, Bai Q, Huang G, Bindoff AD, Li R, Wang X, St George RJ, Rudd K, Bartlett L, Collins JM, Aiyede M, Fernando N, Bhagwat A, Giffard J, Salmon K, McDonald S, King AE, Vickers JC. Development of a smartphone screening test for preclinical Alzheimer’s disease and validation across the dementia continuum. BMC Neurology 2024, 24, 127.
    • Karunarathna S, Breslin M, Alty J, Beare R, Collyer TA, Srikanth VK, McDonald JS, Callisaya ML. Associations Between Brain Structure and Dual Decline in Gait and Cognition. Neurobiology of Aging 2024, 143, 10-18.
    • Alty J, Lawler K, Salmon K, McDonald S, Stuart K, Cleary A, Ma J, Rudd K, Wang X, Chiranakorn-Costa S, Collins J, Merl H, Lin X, Vickers JC. A new one-stop interdisciplinary cognitive clinic model tackles rural health inequality and halves the time to diagnosis: Benchmarked against a national dementia registry. International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry 2023, 38(8), e5988.
    • Costa S, St George RJ, McDonald JS, Wang X, Alty J. Diagnostic accuracy of the overlapping infinity loops, wire cube, and clock drawing tests in subjective cognitive decline, mild cognitive impairment and dementia. Geriatrics 2022, 7(4), 72.
    • Whittingham KM, McDonald JS, Clifford CWG. Synesthetes show normal sound-induced flash fission and fusion illusions. Vision Research 2014, 105, 1-9.
    • McDonald JS, Adibi M, Clifford CWG, Arabzadeh E. Sampling Time and Performance in Rat Whisker Sensory System. PLoS ONE 2014, 9(12), e116357.
    • Adibi M, McDonald JS, Clifford CWG, Arabzadeh E. Population Decoding in Rat Barrel Cortex: Optimizing the Linear Readout of Correlated Population Responses. PLoS Computational Biology 2014, 10(1), e1003415.
    • McDonald JS, Clifford CWG, Solomon SS, Chen SC, Solomon SG. Integration and segregation of multiple motion signals by neurons in area MT of primate. Journal of Neurophysiology 2014, 111(2), 369–378.
    • Adibi M, McDonald JS, Clifford CWG, Arabzadeh E. Adaptation Improves Neural Coding Efficiency Despite Increasing Correlations in Variability. Journal of Neuroscience 2013, 33(5), 2108–2120.
    • McDonald JS, Mannion DJ, Clifford CWG. Gain control in the response of human visual cortex to plaids. Journal of Neurophysiology 2012, 107(9), 2570–2580.
    • Iyer PB, Freeman AW, McDonald JS, Clifford CWG. Rapid serial visual presentation of motion: Short-term facilitation and long-term suppression. Journal of Vision 2011, 11(3), 16.
    • Goddard E, Mannion DJ, McDonald JS, Solomon SG, Clifford CWG. Color responsiveness argues against a dorsal component of human V4. Journal of Vision 2011, 11(4), 3.
    • Lavan D, McDonald JS, Westbrook RF, Arabzadeh E. Behavioural Correlate of Choice Confidence in a Discrete Trial Paradigm. PLoS ONE 2011, 6(10), e26863.
    • Mannion DJ, McDonald JS, Clifford CWG. The influence of global form on local orientation anisotropies in human visual cortex. NeuroImage 2010, 52(2), 600–605.
    • McDonald JS, Mannion DJ, Goddard E, Clifford CWG. Orientation-selective chromatic mechanisms in human visual cortex. Journal of Vision 2010, 10(12), 34.
    • Clifford CWG, Mannion DJ, McDonald JS. Radial Biases in the Processing of Motion and Motion-Defined Contours by Human Visual Cortex. Journal of Neurophysiology 2009, 102(5), 2974–2981.
    • Seymour KJ, McDonald JS, Clifford CWG. Failure of colour and contrast polarity identification at threshold for detection of motion and global form. Vision Research 2009, 49(12), 1592–1598. In Preparation.
    • Mannion DJ, McDonald JS, Clifford CWG. Discrimination of the local orientation structure of spiral Glass patterns early in human visual cortex. NeuroImage 2009, 46(2), 511–515.
    • McDonald JS, Seymour KJ, Schira MM, Spehar B, Clifford CWG. Orientation-specific contextual modulation of the fMRI BOLD response to luminance and chromatic gratings in human visual cortex. Vision Research 2008, 49(11), 1397–1405.
    • McDonald JS, Tadmor Y. The perceived contrast of texture patches embedded in natural images. Vision Research 2006, 46(19), 3098-3104.
    • Zinke W, Roberts MJ, Guo K, McDonald JS, Robertson R, Thiele A. Cholinergic modulation of response properties and orientation tuning of neurons in primary visual cortex of anaesthetized Marmoset monkeys. European Journal of Neuroscience 2006, 24(1), 314-328.
    • Roberts MJ, Zinke W, Guo K, Robertson R, McDonald JS, Thiele A. Acetylcholine Dynamically Controls Spatial Integration in Marmoset Primary Visual Cortex. Journal of Neurophysiology 2005, 93(4), 2062–2072.

  • Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstracts)

    • Pietrzyk MW, McDonald JS, Brennan PC, Bourne RM. Effect of selective suppression of spatial frequency domain noise on visual detection of a sample object in an inhomogeneous background. In: Progress in Biomedical Optics and Imaging - Proceedings of SPIE. 2012.
    • McDonald JS, Tadmor Y. Second order statistics affects perceived contrast in texture interactions. In: Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science. 2000.
    • McDonald JS, Tadmor Y. Centre - surround contrast interactions of textures depend on image statistics. In: Perception: 23rd European Conference on Visual Perception. 2000, Groningen, Netherlands.