The coffee room and the future of perception research

September 2025 will mark the 25th year since my inaugural lecture as a Professor at Utrecht University. I was appointed Professor a mere 5 years after I had received my PhD and was clearly still wet behind my ears; a Dutch way to say that you are very inexperienced. This lead to my dilemma; for an inaugural lecture it is expected that you make ‘a statement’. Statements relating to new ways of measuring the brain, new topics to explore, new technology to be used. All with one common denominator: How can or will it progress our field? “You are a full Prof now, tell us!”

I had just returned from a sabbatical at the University of Toronto where I had heard Randy MacIntosh talk about the potential of Structural Equation Modelling for studying functional connectivity in the brain. However, in this realm, I was a beginner and while I could see the potential of the technique, I could only make a few general remarks. It was not enough to make a serious point that would be the topic of discussion which typically occurs during the reception that followed such lectures. This meant that I needed to add another focus and came up with ‘the psychology of the coffee room’.

Why the coffee room? During my post-doc years, I realised the importance of a statement that was often made by my undergraduate supervisor Charles de Weert. He was the scientific director of the Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information, the precursor of the now renowned F.C. Donders Centre at Radboud University Nijmegen. His point was that external collaborations are very important, however for most progress one needs to be able to exchange and freely discuss ideas on the work floor. For this to work, you need to meet your colleagues on that very work floor and access to a coffee room helps.

During my post-doc years, I discovered the importance of conversation and discussion in the coffee room or at least a common place where staff and students can meet. At McGill University, with 4 active research groups at the time (Curtis Baker, Robert Hess, Frederick Kingdom and Kathy Mullen) with many post-docs and graduate students, there were daily interactions in their kitchen/coffee room. The same was true during my time at Harvard University, where members of the groups belonging to Ken Nakayama, Patrick Cavanagh, Nancy Kanwisher, and Charles Stromeyer were regularly found in their common room with kitchen. I learned so much from those discussions; got many ideas, started collaborations and made friends for life.

When I returned to the Netherlands, the creative part of my brain was fully loaded, which later paid off with several successful grant applications. I was convinced more than ever of the significance of the role of a ‘place to meet’, that I held my inaugural lecture with a secondary focus on the need for a coffee room as the place for scientific progress. My cry for a coffee room hit a national newspaper, although only as an act of mockery; my new office was on the 17^th floor and the nearest coffee machine apparently on the first. Yet, soon after the faculty management rewarded our department with a functional coffee room. It was so interactive that the Dean later decided to give all groups in the faculty a place where they could meet and converse in a relaxing environment; a coffee room became a standard.

But for a coffee room to work in the manner intended, the staff, post-docs, and graduate students need to be present within the building. Sadly, in 2025, I see that this is lacking, at least as far as I can see from my now ‘Down Under’ desk. Why are so many of us working from home? Talking to a few of my international colleagues, it seems this issue is not isolated to Australia. I do not have data, but walking into our building, I see a lot of empty offices. If this is true everywhere, that can only mean that there is little interaction.

Interaction is even more important nowadays. Courses with only a few attendees have been deleted from the training curriculum because they are often not ‘budget neutral’. These specialised courses are typically targeted at our kind; a small group compared to those interested in the clinical aspects of the mind. The basics of psychophysics, like Fourier Theorem, spatial and temporal filtering, equiluminance, etc. is now taught often face to face(s) and the coffee room seems to be a good place to learn, with several colleagues contributing.

I often hear that ‘in the good old days’ we were part of exciting times, and it looked like ideas were floating everywhere. We all got many grants, and several vision science papers appeared in leading journals like Nature and Science; even on their cover. Unfortunately, we have not seen that for a while now! It appears that we lost our scientific charm, and visual psychophysics is no longer considered attractive enough for the most prestigious journals. What was responsible for this negative spiral? Are modern ways of using office space, like office sharing, hot desking, and open plans to blame? At first sight these innovations were also designed to facilitate interaction. Yet it turned out only to save money, but not to work for scientific productivity, where the need for a quiet place is also a core requirement. Was it Covid-19? It clearly didn't help. The fact remains, that we used to interact much more … on the floor in the coffee room.

There are of course many factors that can play a role, and it is hard to point the precise factor that will bring us back to the frontline of scientific progress. However, with the lack of a better analysis, it is my gut feeling that the best thing to do is to come back to the lab, meet a few times a day in the coffee room, and have all those discussions that we used to have! We need to include the members of the covid generation who now think that the richest knowledge source is a laptop with Google and the electronic uni-library, accessed from their bedroom. They are wrong. In the coffee room, they will enjoy listening to you, and you will enjoy hearing about their views on the latest developments, even if they only like tea instead of coffee… We can only hope for the spin-off again.