Prediction and Attention

Prediction is one of the fundamental organization principles of the brain. For example, when you grab a cup of coffee, your brain predicts how your hand is moving through space, and how the coffee cup will feel when you have grabbed it. When the coffee cup feels different than you had expected (e.g., cold when you thought the coffee was still hot), you immediately notice something isn’t quite right. Predictions thus allow the brain to ignore predictable (and therefore uninteresting) events in the environment, while enhancing the saliency of new, unexpected events. My research interest is to see how predictive mechanisms are implemented in the human brain, and how they interact with attention.

A viable working hypothsis, termed predictive coding, suggests that the brain sets up prior expectations at each level within the cortical hierarchy. According to this model, incoming information traversing the brain is compared at each stage with the prior expectation. Predictions travel backwards from higher-order association areas to lower-level sensory areas, while prediction errors lead to enhanced forward flow from lower-level to higher-level brain regions.

By using behavioural experiments in healthy participants and state-of-the-art psychophysical/neuroimaging methods (MEG, fMRI, TMS, eye tracking) the aim is to investigate how predictions influence visual perception and inference.

Other research interests

Some other research themes that I am interested in, are:

• How do we accumulate information? Is consciousness necessary for accumulation of information?
• What is the role of motor simulations for action understanding? Do we understand others by simulating them? How neurally similar is motor simulation and motor planning?
• Structural plasticity induced by environmental deprivation and enrichment.

If you want to know more about my past research, you can check out my publications.