Events

With new avenues for ADHD diagnosis, how can we ensure appropriate levels of care for this complex neurological condition?

There has been significant media attention lately on the increase in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses in Australia, sparking a complex debate among healthcare professionals, educators, and the public.

While the estimated prevalence of ADHD in Australian children and adolescents remains consistent with global statistics, a surge in diagnoses in adults has health professionals reviewing the reasons why this might be the case.

This panel event will discuss how an increased awareness of ADHD has sparked a debate among healthcare professionals about how to ensure an accurate diagnosis of the condition. 

Professor Beatrice de Gelder presents her group’s research, challenging conventional theories by building bridges between classical body perception and innate priors in the human visual system. Her approach jointly addresses category selectivity and functional roles of neural areas in body perception. Professor De Gelder aims to identify midlevel visual processes between high-order symbolic thought and low-level physical ones, serving as biological building blocks for complex whole-body expressions. Her talk covers conscious and non-conscious visual perception in patients with cortical damage, face recognition and its deficits, whole body posture and movement perception, and emotional expression in whole bodies. She explores neuroethological priors in body perception and social interaction, comparing social communication in human and non-human primates. Professor De Gelder’s research aims to uncover the neural determinants of nonverbal communication, offering new perspectives on how the brain perceives and interprets bodies and social signals.