From Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit, Dynamics of memory formation

will present the talk titled

Exploring the predictive mechanisms of perception in multimodal environments

Abstract

Our senses are continuously bombarded with information, most of which at any given moment is irrelevant for our goals. In humans the main sensory system is the visual, so we tend to guide our perception and actions based on this modality. Sometimes irrelevant stimuli from a different modality can be distracting (e.g.: loud music while trying to understand a difficult paper), but there are situations that present cross-modal regularities, in which stimuli from a “secondary” modality might act as a cue, affecting the processing of relevant visual information (e.g.: McGurk effect). Most of the previous work on perceptual predictions have employed simple and unimodal paradigms. We want to directly compare the effects of auditory information in a visual task, both when these sounds are task irrelevant (i.e.: distractors) and when they are predictive of targets (e.g.: cues). Moreover, using fMRI on healthy participants, we will test a novel hypothesis which could resolve a debate over the neural mechanisms of expectation suppression.

Location: Online (Microsoft Teams). Click here to join the meeting