How our brain selects what we hold on to
The ACCESS2WM project, funded under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships scheme, has looked at how information is prioritised for access to human working memory of visual information. As Dr Freek van Ede, fellow and lead researcher explains: “Working memory is a fundamental building block of adaptive cognition that allows us to hold available past sensory information in anticipation that this will become relevant for guiding ensuing perception and action.” Anticipation and brain waves give key access Operating with limited capacity, it makes sense for the brain to select pieces of information for the working memory that are expected to be most important. The researchers therefore looked at the cognitive and neural mechanisms that govern access to this important memory cache. Using electroencephalography measurements, the researchers looked at the effects of anticipation on selection of to-be-remembered targets rather than competing distractors. “We have uncovered novel mechanisms of how anticipatory brain states prioritise the processing of (to-be-remembered) targets over temporally competing distractors,” Dr van Ede reports. Results showed that anticipation not only boosted visual target representations, but also delayed the interference on these target representations caused by temporally adjacent distractors. Diving further into the neural mechanisms that support prioritised memory access, ACCESS2WM was also able to link such access to physiological brain states prior to memory encoding. In particular, states of attenuated 8-12 Hz alpha-band oscillations, the dominant waves in the brain, help prioritise targets from competing distractors. Widespread dissemination with Marie Curie grant support During the 2-year duration of the ACCESS2WM project, Dr van Ede took the lead in all aspects of research, including experimental design, data collection, analysis and dissemination. The full account of the anticipation and brain wave experiment has already been published in Nature Communications(opens in new window). In addition, publication is pending for another two major discoveries related to access to and from working memory. The fellow, with his colleagues at the University of Oxford, have also contributed review articles that have appeared in high-profile journals, including Nature Reviews Neuroscience (opens in new window) and Trends in Neurosciences (opens in new window). “I also supervised many related research projects in the host laboratory of which several have already resulted in shared first/last author publications,” he adds. Presentations at several international conferences and other universities completed a truly full research and dissemination schedule. A plethora of new protocols for future research Refining investigative methods during the course of the project, ACCESS2WM has developed several techniques to investigate working memory. These include novel protocols for tracking attentional selection and use of state-of-the-art multivariate and eye-tracking analyses for tracking cognitive representations in dynamic settings. The breakdown of working memory is often ascribed as a core problem behind cognitive disorders, an increasing prevalence in modern-day society, a classic example being ADHD. It is highly conceivable that at least part of these deficits originate from a non-adaptive regulation of information access to and from working memory. These developments have ample potential for generating novel research directions and possibly also therapeutic strategies. “In this sense, the project provides an excellent springboard for several new lines of research, that we (and hopefully also others) plan to embark on in the years to come,” Dr van Ede concludes.
