By studying the eyes, a researcher explores how the brain sorts information

A cyclist is pedaling down the side road. Signs, trees and fire hydrants whip by. As they bike along, their brain takes in information from what they’ve perceived but is admittedly not going to see. Their brain sorts through that information — the colour, shape and text on signs, as an instance — and selects what is most significant. In keeping with that, the biker takes essentially the most effective turn and continues on.

Freek van Ede uses kind of greater than various bicycling metaphors. This is smart for a researcher inside of the Netherlands. A cognitive neuroscientist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, van Ede studies attention. His point of interest is now not on external attention — what somebody is looking at or attending to inside of the moment. In its place, van Ede is looking to snatch internal attention — how the brain makes a speciality of and grabs exactly what it needs from vast amounts of incoming information to guide future behavior.

Van Ede thinks of the brain as an organ of anticipation. Whether we’re riding a bike, driving a car or catching a ball, the use of up to this point experience to guide upcoming actions is a process our brains are functioning at all times. “It’s with out a doubt on the core of cognition,” van Ede says. This process depends on working memory, the ability to store information short-term, but also attention — because we ought to % out from that stored information to translate it into action. “It’s with out a doubt a fundamental process, and I believe that’s what appeals to me about it. And I might like to snatch how it really works.”

Though scientists often form subdisciplines that treat different aspects of brain functions as discrete areas of research, van Ede hopes to combine studies of working memory and attention to get a far better working out of thought as a complete. Along the style, van Ede and his colleagues have developed new techniques to measure exactly how people may most likely be processing the arena around them.

Van Ede and his collaborators have “with out a doubt pushed the investigation of the connection between attention and working memory in sort of new and fresh directions,” says Tobias Egner, a cognitive neuroscientist at Duke University. “It’s with out a doubt gained fresh momentum inside of the last decade, and I believe Freek’s work is being kind of influential in that.”

Being attentive to time

During his undergraduate studies at Utrecht University inside of the Netherlands, van Ede became thrilled to in sorting out that he may continue studying and learning for his whole career — all he had to do became turn out to be a scientist. He in particular recalls what drew him to his eventual postdoctoral mentor, Kia Nobre, who is now at Yale University. He remembers “just reading her studies and thinking, ‘Hey, there’s somebody doing things a bit different than many other folks do it.’”

At the time, most cognitive neuroscientists were looking at attention in the case of space —putting blocks in kind of various places on a screen, as an instance, and asking people to % out lots of the blocks. Nobre, nevertheless, became how time may play a role.

Van Ede began focused on the question of time, too. Despite the total thing, we don’t spend our lives frozen in time, responding to objects on a screen. We move through the arena and see things in sequence. “When we perform a dance, or perchance ride a bike or anything else we do,” van Ede says, “our movements are carefully orchestrated in time.”

Getting a more real-world picture means measuring brain activity in real time, which is why van Ede uses electroencephalography, or EEG (SN: 7/6/21). “It’s kind of remarkable that we can put an electrode on somebody’s skull … and we can measure electrical activity emitted by the brain,” he says. “That means we can measure brain activity because it’s going on.” People move freely in EEG caps, and so encounter the arena more realistically.

The eyes have it

Before everything, van Ede and his colleagues were pairing EEG with eye-tracking data — a technique to be certain participants looked at what they were told to. “One day, I determined to as this will likely be dive in and explore the eye data,” van Ede says. “I believe out of curiosity with out a doubt.” He found that after somebody became asked to recall something about an object that had been on-screen, their gaze flicked toward where the article had been, though it became not there.

That flicking became detectable as microsaccades — tiny unconscious movements that your eyes make multiple times per 2d. These microsaccades are invisible to the naked eye and are smaller than the saccades that your eyes make two to once or twice per 2d to soak up a visible scene.

When study participants shifted their attention to point of interest on where an object had been, the microsaccades were systematically pulled inside of the direction of that attention shift. “We soon realized this discovery also opened new opportunities for ‘tracking the mind’s eye,’” van Ede says, and so deciphering what information the brain is the use of to plot future action.

Van Ede’s lab has used the technique to disclose that after preparing for the long-term, the brain doesn’t hold multiple pieces of disparate information and wait until every of the information is in to make a plan. In its place, the brain plans that that possible most likely imagine actions as every bit of information comes in — though the brain can only % out one plan eventually.

Van Ede “appears to be first-class at coming up with new twists on older designs” for a role, Egner says, “looking at new measures and old measures in new ways.”

The surprise finding is emblematic of the curiosity-driven research that van Ede hopes to emphasise in his lab. A basic working out of how the brain plans actions may someday help us understand memory disorders or attention problems, but that’s now not the primary driver. What he and his team opt to study is “a bit of bit according to our intuition, even what is interesting, or according to some intriguing findings that we'd like to chase down,” van Ede says.

In up to this point work, van Ede and colleagues are looking out out signs of the systematic pulling of microsaccades while participants play in virtual reality. Study participants work inside of a virtual world where objects float past, like signs would on a side road, rather then flashing on-screen as is typical in such tests. Meanwhile, van Ede tracks the tiny eye movements to see how participants’ brains are the use of the information they recently encountered to make a plan. It’s one step closer to biking through the streets of Amsterdam.