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

Projektinformationen

MEMTICIPATION

ID Finanzhilfevereinbarung: 850636

DOI

10.3030/850636

Projekt abgeschlossen

EK-Unterschriftsdatum 18 November 2019

Startdatum 1 September 2020

Enddatum 28 Februar 2026

Finanziert unter

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Gesamtkosten

€ 1 499 746,00

EU-Beitrag

€ 1 499 746,00

Koordiniert durch

STICHTING VU
Netherlands

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

Berichtszeitraum: 2023-09-01 bis 2025-02-28

Zusammenfassung vom Kontext und den Gesamtzielen des Projekts

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.

Arbeit, die ab Beginn des Projekts bis zum Ende des durch den Bericht erfassten Berichtszeitraums geleistet wurde, und die wichtigsten bis dahin erzielten Ergebnisse

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.

Fortschritte, die über den aktuellen Stand der Technik hinausgehen und voraussichtliche potenzielle Auswirkungen (einschließlich der bis dato erzielten sozioökonomischen Auswirkungen und weiter gefassten gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen des Projekts)

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.