From 2020 to 2022, I was funded by a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship of the EU Horizon 2020 scheme. This allowed me to join the lab of Prof. Floris de Lange at the Donders Institute at the Radboud University in Nijmegen to research visual anticipation and its relation to memory. Unfortunately, this fellowship was overshadowed by the COVID-19 pandemic, so progress on the project was a little slower than anticipated.
Here is the project description - stay tuned for upcoming posts on the results of my research!
The visual system in the brain is an anticipatory system: In order to hit a tennis ball during a match, parts of the brain calculate the future trajectory of the ball based on its past travel through the air to enable you to hit the ball. Previous research has shown that the visual system of the brain preplays information about this future trajectory based on previous experience. This pattern completion is preceding any expected movement, meaning that the matching brain activity arises before the actually movement would happen. This makes this so-called visual preplay an anticipating mechanism. In this project, I investigate this in more detail: How does the visual system anticipate such visual movement or other recurring visual events? How is this linked with memory — and where are those memories stored? Taken together, I aim at characterising the visual preplay mechanism and its link to memory to better understand both the visual and memory system as well as its interplay.