Freek van Ede

I am a research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity (OHBA), affiliated with the Brain & Cognition Lab (PI Kia Nobre) and the Attention Lab (PI Mark Stokes). I am funded by a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Post-doctoral Fellowship. I am also the current Tilleard-Cole Junior Research Fellow at Worcester College.

I am interested in the mechanisms by which our brains dynamically extract, prioritise, and utilise information that is relevant to current goals, focusing on perception and working memory, and their ensuing actions. My research primarily uses non-invasive neuroimaging methodologies with high temporal resolution (i.e., magneto- and electro-encephalography, as well as eye-tracking) that allow me to investigate the neural bases of these fundamental cognitive processes in dynamic settings, in healthy human volunteers.

In a dynamic world in which the amount of information that our brains have to cope with is increasing by the day, it becomes increasingly important to understand just how our brains flexibly extract and prioritise relevant over irrelevant information and translate this into adaptive behaviour.

Refining our understanding of the basic mechanisms that underlie this fundamental cognitive capacity – broadly construed as ‘attention’ – may ultimately also improve the characterisation and treatment of increasingly prevalent cognitive “disorders” that are often attributed to a sub-optimal functioning of this core capacity.

Academic history:
I completed my bachelor’s degree in Psychology at the University of Utrecht, followed by a Master’s and PhD degree at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour at the Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands). During my Doctorate, I worked with Eric Maris (main PhD advisor) as well as Ole Jensen and Floris de Lange (co-advisors).