Preparing memories for action: how visual working memories are sculpted by their anticipated use

Project Information

MEMTICIPATION

Grant agreement ID: 850636

DOI

10.3030/850636

Project closed

EC signature date 18 November 2019

Start date 1 September 2020

End date 28 February 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 746,00

EU contribution

€ 1 499 746,00

Coordinated by

STICHTING VU
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - MEMTICIPATION (Preparing memories for action: how visual working memories are sculpted by their anticipated use)

Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2025-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The ERC-StG grant MEMTICIPATION aims to bring together the study of working memory and anticipation: understanding how we use our working memory not to hold onto the past (the focus of much past research), but to prepare for the future. The primary objective is to gain new insight into the fundamental cognitive and neural mechanisms of a working memory that looks forward – anticipating relevant moments, tasks, and actions to effectively guide upcoming behaviour.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Despite starting amid the pandemic, we have already made relevant progress on the project. We have developed novel laboratory tasks to bring together the study of visual working memory and action planning, laboratory tasks in which we link different memory contents to different task demands, and laboratory tasks in which we have experimentally dissociated past and future memory attributes. We have been relying on brain measurements (EEG) and eye-tracking measurements, have incorporated Virtual Reality, and have developed analysis approaches to track the proactive nature of working memory across time. So far, this has resulted in several publications, multiple pre-prints, and several promising results that we aim to disseminate over the coming year.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

We have uncovered novel principles and properties of attention and working memory that we are in the process of disseminating – such as the joint retention and selection of past and future memory attributes, the cooperation of visual retention and action planning, and the efficient spatial coding used for covert selective attention inside working memory. We have developed novel tasks and analysis approaches that propel our future research endeavours and that we are starting to see being used also by other researchers in the community. We have presented our initial findings at international conferences and expert meetings in the form of keynotes, talks and posters. We have engaged with bachelor and master students who have done research-thesis projects with us. Finally, since the start of the ERC project, the PI has received several awards, including the young investigator awards from the Dutch Society for Brain and Cognition (NVP, 2022), the British Association for Cognitive Neuroscience (BACN, 2023) and the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS, 2023).

Being close to finishing year 3, we anticipate to continue disseminating current results and to set-up further projects into the proactive nature of visual working memory and attention. In the process we will continue to keep developing novel task and analysis approaches to push beyond the current state of the art.