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Our brain is highly effective at predicting future sensory input based on learned associations between stimuli. For instance, ample previous research has shown that if we can predict an upcoming perceptual stimulus because it always reliably follows another perceptual...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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.,...

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,...

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...

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.

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

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

Lawrence SJD, Formisano E, Muckli L, de Lange FP (2017). Laminar fMRI: Applications for cognitive neuroscience. NeuroImage, in press. pdf

de Lange FP, Fritsche M (2017). Perceptual decision-making: picking the low-hanging fruit? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, in press. read the paper here