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You’re in the middle of the living room, looking for your smartphone. Is it on the table, among your breakfast plate, the bread and papers you should have tidied up earlier? Yes, there it is! Further down the table next to the fruit bowl. Surya Gayet, neuropsychologist at Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ, knows better than anyone else how this seemingly simple search process works. In that appeared online in Current Biology on 16 December, the Utrecht-based researcher explains how people are surprisingly good at finding objects in an environment that is very complex from a visual perspective.

Gayet has used functional MRI (fMRI) to demonstrate how people search for objects in a targeted manner. Gayet: ‘Take a smartphone on the table, for example. But also a bicycle in the bicycle rack, or friends at a festival.’ Gayet explains that during our ‘search’, a so-called ’mental picture’ is created in the visual areas of our brain. A mental picture of the object we're looking for. ‘We can read this out with fMRI. By means of my research, I have shown that the mental image adapts dynamically to the location where we are looking.’

We create, in our brain, a mental picture of the object we are looking for.

The brain makes predictions

Although this may sound complicated, according to Gayet it’s not too bad: ‘Imagine that you’re looking for your smartphone, which is probably a little further away. On the table. In our brain, we will also make the mental picture of the smartphone smaller. Simply because something in the distance looks smaller. And if we are searching for the object closer at hand, we will make the mental picture bigger again.’ So while we search, our brain is continuously making predictions about how the object we are looking for should look (in a certain place), to increase our chances of finding this object in the environment.