Significant progress has been made in understanding the neural mechanisms underlying spatial attention and working memory. However, in natural settings, the rapid flow of information during saccades and speech perception poses challenges to the mechanisms supporting these cognitive functions. To address this, we are developing a research program using magnetoencephalography (MEG) in humans to investigate these mechanisms during natural tasks such as visual exploration, reading, and language comprehension. During visual exploration, we find that both feature and category information about upcoming saccade targets can be accessed as early as 100 ms after fixation on the pre-saccadic object. Similarly, in natural reading, both orthographic and semantic information can be extracted from upcoming saccade targets within 100 ms of fixating on the preceding word. Importantly, during both visual exploration and reading, saccades are locked to the phase of ongoing alpha oscillations, suggesting that these oscillations are important for visuo-motor coordination. During language comprehension, working memory is crucial for storing information across embedded sentences. We have identified the neural network and temporal dynamics associated with the maintenance and reactivation of this information during sentence processing. In conclusion, our approach demonstrates how concepts and mechanisms identified in cognitive neuroscience can be applied to understand the key neuronal operations required for naturalistic tasks.

References * Wang, L., Frisson, S., Pan, Y., and Jensen, O. (2024) Fast hierarchical processing of orthographic and semantic parafoveal information during natural reading. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.27.615440v1 * Fakche, C., Hickey, C., and Jensen, O. (2024) Fast feature- and category-related parafoveal previewing support free visual exploration. J Neurosci 44: e0841242024 * Pan, Y., Popov, T., Frisson, S., and Jensen, O. (2023) Saccades are locked to the phase of alpha activity during natural reading. PLoS Biol 21(1):e3001968 * Pan, Y., Frisson, S., and Jensen, O. (2021) Neural evidence for lexical parafoveal processing. Nature Communications 12:5234 * Jensen, O., Frisson, S., Pan, Y., and Wang, L. (2021) A pipelining mechanism supporting previewing during visual exploration and reading. Trends in Cogn Sci 25:103301044