Key Findings:
- Eye movements correlate with the “mind’s eye” as it retrieves information from visual memory
- Following the mind’s eye has revealed how visual memory is organized and used to accomplish tasks
- Our brains are actively anticipating the future and harnessing the most relevant details from our memory and sensory experiences
At times, professional athletes seem to have magical abilities. How could she execute a perfect pass to her teammate without ever looking in her direction? How could he line up his shot before the ball even reached him? It seems like these players can anticipate the future, which often makes the difference between a championship winning goal and a disappointing defeat. Surprisingly, research by Dr. Freek van Ede, a cognitive neuroscientist studying the intersection of visual attention, memory, and action, reveals that the same cognitive abilities underlying these defining moments occur constantly as we move throughout daily life. Each of us must hold ever-changing information in our minds, a process called “working memory,” and anticipate any number of possible futures in order to act swiftly and accurately. Dr. van Ede’s work shows that our brains are not just receiving and reacting to sensory information as it arises, but actively preparing for many likely scenarios and selectively focusing on our most relevant memories to accomplish a task. Dissecting each component of a simple action reveals the fascinating complexity that our brains navigate at the speed of life. This sense of wonder has guided Dr. van Ede and his research team to reveal the “magic” of everyday cognition.
For his groundbreaking research on working memory and visual attention in nearly 100 published articles, FABBS is delighted to recognize Dr. van Ede with the Early Career Impact Award from the Vision Sciences Society. As the first scientist in his family, Dr. van Ede did not immediately consider becoming an academic. However, in college, he discovered that it was possible to continue pushing the frontiers of knowledge through a lifelong career in research. Now, as a faculty member at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, he is passionate about training the students in his Proactive Brain Lab, readily crediting their collaboration and creativity as one of the sparks for his own voracious curiosity.
Dr. van Ede and his team are widely recognized for using old technologies in innovative ways, including showing that small eye movements called microsaccades correlate with a person’s attention to visual memories. As he notes, eye-tracking technology had long been used to monitor and ensure gaze fixation during neuroscience studies of cognition, such as with electroencephalography (EEG) or functional MRI. Eye movements had been considered a confounding, nuisance variable for this type of research, but one day, Dr. van Ede’s curiosity steered him to look closer at the data. What he found was surprising – when participants tried to recall an object he had shown them, their eyes made small, nearly imperceptible movements back towards the direction of the point in space where the object had been shown. This provided a novel window into cognitive processes that are inherently challenging to measure: via these small but meaningful shifts in gaze, scientists could now track the mind’s eye! While the stories of scientific breakthroughs are often framed around “Eureka!” moments of sudden insight like this, Dr. van Ede tells the story of progress a little differently.
Far from a single moment of discovery, his breakthrough actually paved the way for years of careful, incremental studies that collectively and increasingly reveal general principles about how the brain functions. One particularly exciting study uncovered how brains forecast the future and proactively ‘look ahead’ in memory when guiding sequential behavior. In this study, Dr. van Ede had participants switch between recalling details about objects they had been shown on the right and left fields of view. After both objects disappeared, participants would sequentially report details from each at the center of the screen. While reporting about the memorized object that was once on the left, participants’ eyes started to shift focus to the memorized object that was once on the right, in anticipation of the next step. This was surprising, since it suggested that the mind was simultaneously completing one task (reporting on the left memory object) and proactively focusing on information that would be relevant in the near future (reporting the right memory object).
Subsequent steps of Dr. van Ede’s work put both objects and people in motion to probe new questions. For example, where would the mind’s eye search for a bird in flight that temporarily goes out of sight behind a building? His research found that people engaged both the last point where they had seen an object and the likely location where it would reappear. Similarly, combining virtual reality and eye tracking allowed him and his colleagues to study how the mind organizes visual memory when a person is moving. Participants were shown an object on one side of their body and then turned 90 degrees. Now, when asked to remember details like the object’s color or shape, would their eyes dart back to the position of the object relative to their own body or to where it had been shown relative to the other memory objects? They found that the brain used both the relative and objective locations of the object to organize and support memory.
As Dr. van Ede’s award-winning early career has shown, “an answer always brings a new question.” Funding that enables curious researchers to continue pursuing each new question is the backbone of successful programs of research like his. As Dr. van Ede points out, grants that only support short-term applications may work against the very goal of discovering novel insights and solutions. “With the mindset that ‘If you can’t solve disorders of attention or memory or develop a product in the next 5 years, I’m not going to fund you,’ we’re never going to make any headway on things that inevitably take more time and are dependent on fundamental knowledge.” Funding basic research fertilizes the soil of knowledge that nurtures ideas we will ultimately harvest to solve humanity’s biggest challenges.
Dr. van Ede’s early-career research has already made immense strides towards uncovering basic operating principles of cognition and has contributed new methodological approaches for understanding the mind in dynamic settings. As he looks to the future, he envisions increasingly studying the dynamic processes governing core memory and attention operations as his participants engage in more natural forms of behavior. He also anticipates that he and collaborators will work to convert a growing base of knowledge into approaches to support attention and memory, whether for students cramming for exams or people affected by memory impairing conditions.
Future Directions
- Incorporate virtual-reality technology to understand how the brain organizes visual memory as it moves through space
- Form collaborations where basic insights and rigorous methods can be applied to understanding and treating memory-related disorders
