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.