by Micha Heilbron | Nov 13, 2018 | Publications
It has long been recognised that prior knowledge and expectations can strongly influence perception, but the neural mechanisms and computational principles underlying this influence are just beginning to be understood. In this paper, we review recent findings that...
by David Richter | Oct 19, 2018 | Publications
Our brains do not just passively record the environment, but rather actively predict upcoming stimuli. In our recent fMRI study, we investigated how neural responses to everyday objects change depending on whether they are expected or unexpected. Participants saw two...
by Mariya Manahova | Aug 17, 2018 | Publications
Our knowledge about the environment can influence the way we perceive things around us. In this study, we investigated how brain activity changes when we are familiar with an image (i.e., we have seen it before) or when we expect a particular image (i.e., we expect to...
by Floris de Lange | Apr 16, 2018 | Publications
Every day we translate the sound waves of speech into meaningful words and sentences. When we do that, we categorize ambiguous sounds into discrete percepts (e.g. phonemes /b/ and /d/). Different speakers can pronounce phonemes differently, but our brain can flexibly...
by Lieke van Lieshout | Feb 26, 2018 | Publications
Curiosity is one of our most fundamental biological drives and it is important for many things we do in our everyday life. Imagine for example that you hear your phone beep in your pocket. Probably, you will feel the urge to check the message right away, even though...
by admin | Dec 5, 2017 | Publications
In a series of three experiments, we investigated the relationship between expectations and conscious perception. By manipulating stimulus expectations within the attentional blink paradigm, we were able to show that valid stimulus expectations increase the likelihood...
