In everyday life, we use our past experiences, stored as memories, to forecast and prepare for relevant events to unfold. Memories from different timescales, including long-term memories, act together with our current task goals to anticipate the locations, timings, and defining features of target events. Our lab has contributed to understanding the fundamental role of long-term memory in guiding attention by developing new tasks to isolate memory-based selective anticipation and investigate how it modulates perceptual processing and motor preparation.

Current topics of research include:

• How memories for different dimensions (space, timing, features) guide proactive anticipation of events
• Whether and how memory-based templates prioritise or distort stored information to guide attention effectively depending on the task context
• How different long-term-memory systems contribute to memory-based orienting of attention
• How memory-based attention and memory-based retrieval change with ageing and become disrupted in different types of neurodegenerative disorders

Theoretical perspectives:

• Nobre AC, Stokes MG (2019) Premembering experience: a hierarchy of time-scales for proactive attention. Neuron 104:132-46. (Review)

Key empirical contributions:

• Boettcher SEP, Shalev N, Wolfe JM, Nobre AC (2022) Right place, right time: Spatiotemporal predictions guide attention in dynamic visual search. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 151(2):348-62.
• Boettcher SEP, van Ede F, Nobre AC (2020) Functional biases in attentional templates from associative memory. Journal of Vision, 20(13):7
• Cravo AM, Rohenkohl G, Santos KM, Nobre AC (2017) Temporal anticipation based on memory. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 29:2081–89.
• Stokes MG, Atherton K, Patai EZ, Nobre AC (2012) Long-term memory prepares neural activity for perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109(6):E360–7.
• Summerfield JJ, Lepsien J, Gitelman DR, Mesulam MM, Nobre AC (2006) Orienting attention based on long-term memory experience. Neuron 49(6):905–16.