Mapping neural activity during naturalistic visual and memory search

Abstract

In everyday life, individuals often search for one of several items stored in memory. This cognitive process, known as hybrid search, is critical for tasks like navigating using landmarks. While the behavioral aspects of hybrid search have been extensively studied, the underlying neural mechanisms remain less understood. In this study, we combined concurrent magnetoencephalography (MEG) and eye movement recordings to investigate the oscillatory and evoked neural dynamics supporting hybrid search in naturalistic settings. Twenty-one participants (12 males, 9 females) performed a free-viewing task involving visual search for targets embedded in memory (hybrid search) across naturalistic scenes. Time-Frequency analyses revealed specific neural signatures during memory encoding, retention, and visual search. During encoding and retention, posterior alpha-band power decreased with memory load, reflecting heightened perceptual and mnemonic demands. During visual search, frontoparietal beta-band activity scaled with memory load, suggesting increased cognitive control. By aligning MEG signals to eye movement events and applying source reconstruction, we identified an early visually evoked lambda response, localized to V1, followed by a distributed P3m component, with maximum activation in the right inferior parietal lobe, that discriminated target from distractor fixations. Together, these findings demonstrate how oscillatory and evoked responses dynamically support hybrid search in naturalistic settings, revealing how memory, attention, and visual processing interact during active vision. Significance statementUnderstanding how the brain supports everyday tasks, like searching for familiar objects, requires studying cognition under realistic conditions, yet most knowledge comes from highly controlled lab tasks with simple stimuli. Here, we combined MEG and eye-tracking to examine how the brain supports free-viewing hybrid search -looking for any of several remembered items-across natural scenes. We found memory load modulations in posterior alpha oscillations during encoding and retention, as well as in frontoparietal beta oscillations during search. By time-locking neural signals to eye movements, we identified a robust marker of target detection. These findings provide direct evidence of how attention, memory, and vision interact in realistic settings, helping bridge the gap between controlled experimental paradigms and real-world cognition.