Freek van Ede studies how our working memory not only temporarily stores information, but more importantly actively processes and prioritises it to anticipate future behaviour.
Small eye movements, big insights
A cyclist navigates through the busy city. Road signs, pedestrians, and other objects flash by. The brain processes this information at lightning speed, even after the objects have disappeared from sight, and selects exactly what is important for the next action. This ability to use the past for future behaviour is central to Freek van Ede's groundbreaking work.
Van Ede is associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at VU Amsterdam, where he directs the Proactive Brain Lab. His research focuses on how our brain prepares for purposeful behaviour, with particular attention to working memory. This system appears to be not only a repository for the past, but primarily a tool for anticipating the future. Van Ede shows how the brain selectively activates and transforms relevant information to serve behaviour – for example, when a footballer anticipates the position of team mates to make a pass, or when someone registers information on a road sign before taking the correct exit.
A major breakthrough in his work was the discovery that tiny, unconscious eye movements – microsaccades – reliably signal how our brain focuses on information in working memory. This technique has three major advantages: it makes it possible to measure very precisely over time how cognitive processes unfold; it shows in which direction our attention is moving; and it also works in moving subjects. Using this method, Van Ede made several discoveries about how working memory works: how it looks ahead during successive actions, and how our brain remembers objects in multiple ways simultaneously – both where an object was last seen as well as where it is expected to appear again. He has also shown how the brain stores this information intelligently and efficiently.
By combining EEG measurements, eye-tracking and virtual reality, he mapped cognitive processes in a new way. Whereas these are usually studied in static laboratory situations, Van Ede is developing methods to investigate them in dynamic contexts, including in moving subjects. Indeed, one of his key insights is that visual cognition is fundamentally action-oriented: we do not simply perceive, but we perceive in order to act.
In the coming years, Van Ede wants to further investigate how our brain proactively processes information. He wants to understand how different cognitive processes and our actions work together, such as how while turning on the kettle we are already thinking about grabbing a tea bag. By studying these processes more extensively in moving subjects we can eventually understand how they work, for example, when we are cycling through a busy city. His fundamental curiosity about how the human brain works, driven not by research trends but by substantive questions, makes him a scientist who continues to innovate his field.
Freek van Ede (1985) studied Psychology and Neuroscience at Utrecht University and Radboud University. In 2014 he obtained his PhD with honours from Radboud University. After five years of postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford, he founded the Proactive Brain Lab at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2020. Together with his team, he investigates the processes underlying human working memory such as how people select and transform traces of memory to serve behaviour. Van Ede has received research grants from ERC and NWO as well as early-career awards from Dutch, British and International societies for cognitive neuroscience.
