Freek van Ede

Exogenously driven neural reactivation of spatially matching visual working-memory contents. doi.org/10.64898/202...

Putting the 'Spotlight' on a recent article by @fannycazettes.bsky.social et al. by discussing how “brain leakage” can expose cognitive computations in bodily movements – in turn opening new ways to track cognition. Now out in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social. authors.elsevier.com/a/1mDCZ4sIRv...

Last week to freely download our recent TINS Forum article 'Disambiguating dimensions of external and internal brain processes' before it hits a paywall.
authors.elsevier.com/a/1lygsbotq7...

Concurrent selection of internal goals and external sensations during visual search Internal and external selection processes can codevelop in time to yield efficient search behavior.

Now out in #ScienceAdvances: @baiweiliu.bsky.social and I ask how internal (goal) and external (sensory) selection are coordinated during visual search. The key insight: internal and external selection are not inherently serial, but may develop in parallel in the human brain: doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Disambiguating dimensions of 'external' and 'internal' brain processes. Check our article in @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social on concepts and open question in this burgeoning area of research, with @danielagresch.bsky.social and Kia Nobre from @brognition.bsky.social. authors.elsevier.com/a/1lygsbotq7...

New position, new social media account. After 5 fantastic years in Tuebingen, I moved to @yale.edu and the @wutsaiyale.bsky.social this summer - which means that I’ll be recruiting PhD students and postdocs. Please help me to spread the word and see current opportunities below 👇

Microsaccades strongly modulate but do not directly cause the EEG N2pc marker of spatial attention Researchers often study human attention using microsaccades and the N2pc EEG marker, but it is unclear to what extent microsaccades contribute to N2pc. This study shows that microsaccades modulate N2p...

The human-neuroscience N2pc marker of covert and internal attention co-occurs with spatial biases in microsaccades, 200-300 ms after prompted to shift attention. (How) are these empirical phenomena related? Check it out in the latest work led by @baiweiliu.bsky.social:
doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Looking into Working Memory to Verify Potential Search Targets Finding what you are looking for is a ubiquitous task in everyday life that relies on a two-way comparison between what is currently viewed and internal search goals held in memory. Despite a wealth o...

Our latest study showing how humans look into working memory to verify potential search targets - literally. Now out in @sfnjournals.bsky.social. Check out the article here:
www.jneurosci.org/content/45/3...

Microsaccades track shifting but not necessarily maintaining covert visual-spatial attention Covert attention enables the brain to prioritise relevant visual information without directly looking at it. Ample studies have linked covert visual-spatial attention to the direction of small fixatio...

In 2023, I proposed that microsaccades may predominantly track shifting but not maintaining covert visual-spatial attention: doi.org/10.1073/pnas.... In a project led by Anna van Harmelen, we now provide empirical support for this: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Sensory and motor contents are prioritized dynamically in working memory Attention flexibly modulates sensory contents in working memory, but the dynamics of motor content modulation in working memory remain unclear. This study shows that brain representations of both sens...

Looking for a summer read? Look no further! ☀️

Our most recent paper with Sage Boettcher, @freekvanede.bsky.social and @kianobre.bsky.social is out @plosbiology.org! 🪩

Sensory and motor working-memory contents are both prioritised dynamically, but their prioritisation can be temporally decoupled 🧠

Neural Dynamics of Reselecting Visual and Motor Contents in Working Memory after External Interference In everyday tasks, we must often shift our focus away from internal representations held in working memory to engage with perceptual events in the external world. Here, we investigated how our interna...

📢 New paper out in JoN [@sfnjournals.bsky.social]! With Larissa, Freek [@freekvanede.bsky.social], Kia [@brognition.bsky.social] and Sage [@dynacog-lab.bsky.social], we ask which and when WM contents get reselected after an interrupting external-attention task. 🧵 below (1|9) doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...

Re-focusing visual working memory during expected and unexpected memory tests Memory tests evoke a second stage of internal attentional deployment following both expected and unexpected memory tests, extending attentional re-orienting to working memory.

⏰Finally out in final form:
elifesciences.org/articles/100...

Laureates Ammodo Science Award 2025 announced Leila Akkari, Marvin Tanenbaum, Rik Peels, Jenneke van der Wal, Yoeri van de Burgt, Nathalie Katsonis, Janna Cousijn and Freek van Ede are the winners of the Ammodo Science Award 2025. The laureates w...

A huge honour to be among the 2025 Ammodo Science Awardees for Fundamental Research. Vital credit is due to my mentors and to the past and current members of my team. www.ammodo-science.org/story/ammodo...

Handing out this year's Young Investigator Awards at CNS2025, on behalf of the committee, was a true pleasure and honor - and such fantastic awardees and talks, as well as a truly stimulating meeting once again. Thanks @cogneuronews.bsky.social

Microsaccades reveal preserved spatial organisation in visual working memory despite decay in location-based rehearsal Space provides a foundational scaffold for retaining and selecting visual information in working memory. It remains unclear, however, whether and how …

Bringing together our findings on microsaccade biases during rehearsal and selection in visual working memory, suggesting a 'silent spatial scaffold' for working memory whereby spatial organisation stays preserved even if active space-based rehearsal has ceased

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Concurrent selection of internal goals and external sensations during visual search Flexible goal-directed behaviour relies on the selective processing of internal goal representations and external sensations. Yet, internal and external selection processes have classically been studi...

Our latest findings showing how internal and external visual selection do not necessarily ‘take turns’ but can run in parallel, led by @baiweiliu.bsky.social.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our latest insights into the important role of 'action' in the study of visual working memory: set-size effects driven by changes in action readiness, not visual accessibility. Work led by Rose Nasrawi now out in Progress in Neurobiology: doi.org/10.1016/j.pn...

Attentional shifts bias microsaccade direction but do not cause new microsaccades Communications Psychology - Microsaccades are eye-movements that are modulated by covert and internal shifts of attention. This work shows how shifts in attention bias microsaccade direction...

Our latest findings help appreciate why microsaccades and attention shifts are often correlated but not obligatorily linked: attention shifts do not cause new microsaccades but exclusively bias the direction of microsaccades that happen to be made when shifting attention. rdcu.be/dXNoW

Memory load influences our preparedness to act on visual representations in working memory without affecting their accessibility bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

📜Preprint alert: our latest EEG findings reveal the foreground role action-readiness plays in visual-memory-guided behaviour. Take-home-message: working-memory load affects memory readiness, not accessibility per se. Led by Rose Nasrawi: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We are also thrilled this work made it to the Editor's pick at
@eNeuro: blog.eneuro.org/2024/01/edit...

Microsaccades Track Location-Based Object Rehearsal in Visual Working Memory Besides controlling eye movements, the brain's oculomotor system has been implicated in the control of covert spatial attention and the rehearsal of spatial information in working memory. We investiga...

Over the past years, we have repeatedly shown how microsaccades are a powerful index for selection in visual working memory. We now show that microsaccades also track multi-item rehearsal through memorised locations: doi.org/10.1523/ENEU...