News updates 

PBL meets Visual Cognitive Neuroscience lab

PBL meets Visual Cognitive Neuroscience lab

The Predictive Brain Lab spent a fantastic afternoon with the Visual Cognitive Neuroscience lab, headed by Marius Peelen. We got to know each other through a series of flash talks, worked together in groups brainstorming about the big questions, and wrapped up the day...

read more
Congratulations dr. Manahova!

Congratulations dr. Manahova!

Marisha successfully defended her thesis "familiarity and expectation in visual processing".We were all in awe with her performance and the many duckies! We wish dr. Manahova the best for her next steps in life!            

read more
Congratulations, Dr. Heilbron!

Congratulations, Dr. Heilbron!

Micha Heilbron successfully defended his thesis “Getting Ahead: Prediction as a Window into Language, and Language as a Window into the predictive brain”. He used language processing to evaluate the predictive processing framework. Use your predictive brain to read...

read more
Floris de Lange wins Ammodo Science Award

Floris de Lange wins Ammodo Science Award

We are happy to announce that Floris de Lange won an Ammodo Science Award 2021! It’s a biannual award given to eight scientists in the Netherlands for their contributions to fundamental research in one of four scientific domains. The associated prize money can be used...

read more
Congratulations, Dr. Richter!

Congratulations, Dr. Richter!

On March 11th 2021, David Richter successfully defended his thesis “Prediction throughout visual cortex: How statistical regularities shape sensory processing”. He investigated how expectations influence sensory processing throughout the sensory brain by performing...

read more
Paper published in Journal of Vision

Paper published in Journal of Vision

Our everyday decisions about what we see are often based on ambiguous and unstable sensory input. For instance, we make about three eye movements per second, greatly shifting the visual information that meets our eyes. Yet, despite such instabilities in sensory input,...

read more
Paper published in eLife

Paper published in eLife

Statistical learning describes our ability to acquire and utilize statistical regularities in the environment. Previous research shows that statistical learning can occur in different contexts and modalities. In fact, learning may even occur without explicit awareness...

read more
Paper published in eLife

Paper published in eLife

Recent advances in brain imaging have made it possible to map brain activity in areas of tissue less than a millimeter in size. This resolution offers particular advantages for studying the brain’s outer surface, the cortex. The cortex is traditionally divided into...

read more
Three defenses in three months

Three defenses in three months

We are proud to say that these past three months three of our lab members received the honour of getting a doctorate degree. Erik te Woerd defended his topic: 'Feeling the beat' on the neurophysiology of cueing in Parkinson's disease. Next up was Pim...

read more
Two Marie Curie grants!

Two Marie Curie grants!

The predictive brain lab is happy to announce that both a current member, Alexandra Vlassova, and a member-to-be, Christoph Huber-Huber, have received a Marie Curie grant to execute their postdoctoral research within our lab. Alya Vlassova will be probing the drive of...

read more
Paper published in Cognition

Paper published in Cognition

Our perception of the world often deviates from reality and these deviations can be easily experienced with powerful visual illusions, such as the Müller-Lyer illusion above. The upper line appears to be shorter than the lower line, even though the lines have the...

read more
Paper published in Journal of Vision

Paper published in Journal of Vision

Each time we move our eyes, the image of objects in the world shifts its position on the retina, yet our perception is remarkably stable. Predictive remapping is thought to be an underlying neural mechanism to this visual stability. In our recent studies, we...

read more
Dr. Floris de Lange is now Prof. Floris de Lange

Dr. Floris de Lange is now Prof. Floris de Lange

On November 23, 2018, Floris gave his inaugural lecture: Ceci n’est pas une pipe. During this lecture, he discussed, among other things: the key ingredients of a predictive brain, why we don’t hallucinate our thoughts, how expectations filter our...

read more
Paper published in Current Biology

Paper published in Current Biology

When we remember or imagine a visual experience, the visual cortex is engaged to simulate visual details of the experience we are thinking about. In our recent laminar fMRI study, we examined how signals in visual cortex that occur during visual working...

read more
Congratulations dr. Lüttke!

Congratulations dr. Lüttke!

Claudia Lüttke successfully defended her thesis "What you see is what you hear: Visual influences on auditory speech perception". In a conversation we do not only effortlessly translate soundwaves into words and sentences, but we also use the oral...

read more
Paper published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Paper published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences

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...

read more
International premiere for ‘The Prediction Machine’

International premiere for ‘The Prediction Machine’

The Prediction machine is a documentary about the work done in our lab, made by Marleine van der Werf in collaboration with Floris de Lange. It was an opening film at last year's Inscience festival. Recently it premiered internationally at Imagine Science festival in...

read more
Paper published in The Journal of Neuroscience

Paper published in The Journal of Neuroscience

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....

read more
Paper accepted in Royal Society Open Science

Paper accepted in Royal Society Open Science

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...

read more
Opening the black decoding box

Opening the black decoding box

By Pim Mostert Neural decoding, or multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA), is an advanced analysis technique that has steadily gained in popularity over the past decade. However, I have the impression that these analyses are often treated as black boxes: it...

read more
Paper accepted in The Journal of Neuroscience

Paper accepted in The Journal of Neuroscience

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,...

read more
Eelke Spaak returns to the Donders Institute

Eelke Spaak returns to the Donders Institute

It has been a couple of months since post-doctoral researcher Eelke Spaak returned to the Donders Institute. High time for an introduction! Can you tell us about your return to the Predictive Brain Lab? It is indeed not the first time I’ve been here! I did my PhD...

read more
Predictive Brain Lab at NVP Winterconference

Predictive Brain Lab at NVP Winterconference

Last week the Predictive Brain Lab visited the NVP Winterconference 2017 held by the Dutch Society for Psychonomics (Nederlandse Vereniging Voor Psychonomie). It is a biannual event where over 300 (mainly Dutch) researchers in the field of experimental...

read more
Annelinde Vandenbroucke says goodbye to the lab

Annelinde Vandenbroucke says goodbye to the lab

Post-doctoral researcher Annelinde Vandenbroucke is, sadly leaving the Donders Institute. We said goodbye to our dear colleague and asked her about her time in the Predictive Brain Lab.   When did you join the Predictive Brain Lab?   I officially joined the...

read more
Paper accepted in Journal of Neuroscience

Paper accepted in Journal of Neuroscience

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...

read more
Paper accepted in NeuroImage

Paper accepted in NeuroImage

Albers AM, Meindertsma T, Toni I, de Lange FP (2017). Decoupling of BOLD amplitude and pattern classification of orientation-selective activity in human visual cortex. NeuroImage, in press.

read more
Paper accepted in PNAS

Paper accepted in PNAS

Kok P, Mostert P, de Lange FP (2017). Prior expectations induce pre-stimulus sensory templates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in press.

read more