Past and present goals are represented concurrently during visual search.

Overview

1. Experimental Psychology, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
2. Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
3. Department of Psychology, Institute of Mind and Biology, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America

Abstract

Visual selection is often conceptualized as emerging from goal-, stimulus- and history-driven processes within spatial priority maps. Although extensive work detailed the interplay between goal- and stimulus-driven selection, it is largely unknown how goal- and history-driven processes jointly drive selection. While persistent neural firing likely underlies goal-driven selection, it is generally assumed that activity-silent mechanisms effectuate history-driven selection. Due to these different underlying neural mechanisms, simultaneously tracking goal- and history-driven influences neurally has proven difficult. We here employed EEG decoding techniques to simultaneously track and compare goal- and history-driven influences on search. We first established a history-driven signal: Neural decoding closely tracked the target location from the preceding trial. We further demonstrated simultaneous, distinct neural representations of the current and preceding target locations. Strikingly, even when participants attended an upcoming target location before search could commence, prior target locations were reactivated. Our results show that past experiences are reactivated in an inflexible fashion, and do so even when prior targets are completely task-irrelevant. Together, we demonstrate that goal- and history-driven selection are neurally distinct, and reveal that both influences are represented in parallel.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Code

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Data

Datasets cited

• osf:a9mvb, at OSF; found in “Data Availability”
• osf:nshgd, at OSF; found in “Data Availability”

Data Availability

Scripts to reproduce the reported results are available via the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/ry683/. The data accompanying the original publications are available here: https://osf.io/nshgd/ and https://osf.io/a9mvb/.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Version 1, 28 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 4 authors, 7 MeSH terms, 1 funder, 76 references.

Cite

This paper

Koevoet, D., Van Moorselaar, D., Awh, E., & Van der Stigchel, S. (2026). Past and present goals are represented concurrently during visual search. PLoS biology, 24(5), e3003779. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003779

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