News updates
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...
Hooray—4 Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowships for the Predictive Brain Lab!
We’re excited to announce that the Predictive Brain Lab’s very own Eva Berlot, Lea-Maria Schmitt and Yamil Vidal as well as Judit Fazekas from the University of Manchester have been awarded Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowships to conduct their research in our lab! As a...
Updating contextual sensory expectations for adaptive behaviour
The brain is capable of creating predictive models of the environment by internalizing statistical regularities in sensory inputs, allowing individuals to perceive and react to the world. However, these predictions must be updated as context changes. While previous...
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!
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...
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...
Paper published on context effects in letter perception
Letters are more easily recognised when embedded in a word. We've all experienced this effect, for instance when navigating in bad weather: it's easier to read a word or name (like a road sign) than a random string (like a licence plate). But why? Historically, there...
Paper published on familiarity facilitating perceptual performance by increasing visual processing speed
Most things in life we have seen before. Familiarity with a stimulus leads to an attenuated neural response to the stimulus. Alongside this attenuation, recent studies have also observed a truncation of stimulus-evoked activity for familiar visual input. One proposed...
Paper published on neural mechanisms for implicit context learning
Humans are remarkably good at knowing where to expect relevant stuff, given a particular context. For example, we intuitively know that we should expect a computer mouse next to the keyboard, and below the monitor. It has been claimed that we can learn these patterns...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Cooper Smout returns to Australia after 7 month visit to the lab
The Predictive Brain lab frequently welcomes researchers from other universities and institutes. These researchers come to the Donders Institute for a limited amount of time to learn techniques and work on projects. One of these researchers is Cooper...
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...
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....
Paper published in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
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.,...
Three NWO grants awarded to Predictive Brain Lab members!
Three grants have been awarded to members of the Predictive Brain Lab by the National Dutch organisation for scientific research NWO. Floortje Bouwkamp received a Research talent grant to pursue her PhD within the lab. She will study how expectations can...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The Prediction Machine documentary premieres at InScience festival
How do we convey scientific insights to the general public? InScience, a science film festival, knows the answer: on the big screen. That is why they started the initiative InVision. This marriage between researchers and filmmakers has now resulted into the...
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.
Paper accepted in Scientific Reports
Utzerath C, St John Saaltink E, Buitelaar J, de Lange FP (2017). Repetition suppression to objects is modulated by stimulus-specific expectations. Scientific Reports, 8;7(1):8781. pdf
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.
Paper accepted in NeuroImage
Lawrence SJD, Formisano E, Muckli L, de Lange FP (2017). Laminar fMRI: Applications for cognitive neuroscience. NeuroImage, in press. pdf
Anke Marit Albers successfully defends her PhD thesis and is interviewed by de Volkskrant
Anke Marit Albers has successfully defended her PhD thesis! De Volkskrant published a very nice interview with her about her PhD research. Click here for a PDF of the interview (in Dutch).
Paper accepted in Trends in Cognitive Sciences
de Lange FP, Fritsche M (2017). Perceptual decision-making: picking the low-hanging fruit? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, in press. read the paper here