Dan Wang

IRL/CAP-Lab meeting

I had loads of fun today, sharing thoughts and projects during a joint lab-meeting with @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social's Imagine Reality Lab. Two hours were way too short to discuss all the cool projects!

Thanks everyone for your contributions 💜

Best hunter trainer ever🫡

Unattended working memory items are coded by persistent activity in human medial temporal lobe neurons - Nature Human Behaviour Paluch et al. show that unattended working memory items, as well as attended ones, are encoded in persistent activity in the medial temporal lobe.

In this Article, Paluch et al. show that unattended working memory items, as well as attended ones, are encoded in persistent activity in the medial temporal lobe. @jankaminski.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Attentional sampling resolves competition along the visual hierarchy Navigating the environment involves engaging with multiple objects, each activating specific neuronal populations. When objects appear together, these populations compete. Classical attention theories...

Thrilled to share our new opinion piece—hot off the press—on attentional sampling, co-authored with the magnificent Flor Kusnir and Daniele Re. It captures where our thinking has landed on this topic after years of work.

www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Last week's symposium titled "Advances in the Encephalographic Study of Attention" was a great success! Held in the KNAW building in Amsterdam and sponsored by the NWO, many of (Europe's) leading attention researchers assembled to discuss the latest advances in attention research using M/EEG.

Now published in Attention, Perception & Psychophysics @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social

Open Access link: doi.org/10.3758/s134...

Guided visual search is associated with target boosting and distractor suppression in early visual cortex Communications Biology - Magnetoencephalography in human participants paired with Rapid Invisible Frequency Tagging reveals that excitability in early visual cortex is modulated to boost targets...

In our new MEG/RIFT study from @thechbh.bsky.social by
@katduecker.bsky.social , we show that feature-guidance in visual search alters neuronal excitability in early visual cortex —supporting a priority-map-based attentional mechanism.
rdcu.be/eqFX7

Thanks to the support of the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and @knaw-nl.bsky.social , we're thrilled to announce the international symposium "Advances in the Encephalographic study of Attention"! 🧠🔍

📅 Date: June 25th & 26th
📍 Location: Trippenhuis, Amsterdam

Through experience, humans can learn to suppress locations that frequently contain distracting stimuli. Using SSVEPs and ERPs, this study shows that such learned suppression modulates early neural responses, indicating it occurs during initial visual processing.
www.jneurosci.org/content/jneu...

Good morning #VSS2025, if you care for a chat about the role of attention in binding object features (during perceptual encoding and memory maintenance), drop by my poster now (8:30-12:30) in the pavilion (422). Hope to see you there!

Thanks for the recommendation! Really nice paper!

Many thanks to my co-authors! ❤️❤️

In conclusion, observers can flexibly de-prioritize and re-prioritize VWM contents based on current task demands, allowing observers to exert control over the extent to which VWM contents influence concurrent visual processing.

In the end, we found no evidence that the influence of non-prioritized memory items on early visual processing differs between the three experimental paradigms. And we found non-prioritized memory items influence early visual processing when we combined the data from three experiments.

In Experiment 3, we also found that only prioritized memory items influenced early visual processing in terms of the allocation of spatial attention.

However, in Experiment 2, we we found that only memory items in a prioritized state influenced early visual processing, as measured through the allocation of spatial attention.

In Experiment 1, we found that both prioritized memory items and non-prioritized memory items can impact early visual processing, as through reports of conscious access, with prioritized memory items influencing early visual processing more strongly than non-prioritized memory items.

We focused on two key aspects of early visual processing: access to visual awareness and attention allocation. We used three perceptual tasks: the breaking continuous flash suppression task (Experiment 1), the attentional capture task (Experiment 2), and a visual search task (Experiment 3).

The priority state of items in visual working memory determines their influence on early visual processing Items held in visual working memory (VWM) influence early visual processing by enhancing memory-matching visual input. Depending on current task deman…

🚨My first paper with Samson Chota, Luzi Xu , Stefan Van der Stigchel and @suryagayet.bsky.social accepted in Consciousness and Cognition(www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...)

We asked whether the impact of VWM content on early visual processing depends on the priority state of the memory items.