From Cognition and Brain Plasticity Unit, Dynamics of memory formation

will present the talk titled

Exploring the role of the hippocampus on perceptual predictions in multisensory environments

Abstract

The human brain is actively engaged in inferring the state of the environment based on the best representative model of the possible sources of (ongoing) sensory stimulation. That is, humans are inferential systems and in line with this notion, the brain has been described as a ‘prediction machine. The hippocampus, a brain region classically associated to rapid memory formation and with bidirectional connections with all the sensory areas, stands as a strong candidate to mediate this type of flexible computations. Nevertheless, whether hippocampal involvement is ubiquitous to all predictive computations is still unknown. Here, we propose a hypothesis that postulates that hippocampus might be primarily involved in prediction of task-relevant information, while detection of prediction violation for task-irrelevant information might not depend on such high-level systems. Instead, prediction violation detection of task-irrelevant sensory inputs could be locally mediated at early sensory-level regions. In addition, we will also explore the possibility that these two mechanisms lead to differentiable degrees of information representation in sensory cortex. To that end, we carried out an fMRI experiment using a multisensory probabilistic cueing paradigm, in which we simultaneously present task relevant and irrelevant stimuli from different modalities to human observers.

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Or in person attendance: Modular Building, room 1.5