Freek van Ede receives Vidi of 800,000 euros

Interal focus
Freek van Ede (Cognitive Psychology, Principal Investigator of the Proactive Brain Lab at VU Amsterdam) receives the Vidi for his research proposal 'Influencing the contents of mind from the outside: understanding and utilising stimulus-driven attention inside working memory'. In summary, his project concerns the 'external control over the internal focus'. The project starts from the perspective that the human brain serves as an interface between the inner (mental) and the external (physical) world. van Ede and his team will uncover how external visual sensations automatically attract attention to corresponding internal representations in visual working memory, and how such external-driven selective memory activation can be used to experimentally manipulate the formation of long-term memory traces.

Van Ede: "The Vidi is a huge boost for my research into internal attention. It makes it possible for me and my research group to open a new direction within our fundamental research into human cognition, as well as to look for the translation of this for possible applications."

NWO Talent Programme
Vidi is aimed at experienced researchers who have already carried out successful research for a number of years after their PhD. Together with the Veni and Vici grants, Vidi is part of the NWO Talent Programme (formerly: the Innovational Research Incentives Scheme). Within the Talent Programme, researchers are free to submit their own subject for funding. In this way, NWO stimulates curiosity-driven and innovative research. NWO selects researchers based on the quality of the researcher, the innovative character of the research, the expected scientific impact of the research proposal and possibilities for knowledge utilisation.