HEИндивидуална стипендия2023–2025

PredInCon · The implementation of predictive coding across the auditory hierarchy

„Хоризонт Европа“ — Действия „Мария Склодовска-Кюри“

Период: 2023-11-01 → 2025-10-31
Финансиране от ЕС: 187 624 €
Участници: 1
Схема: HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF

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Накратко на български

Мозъкът обработва слуховата информация, като съчетава очакванията ни с реалните звуци, например при разпознаване на слаб звук в шумна среда. Разбирането на този процес помага при изследването на психични състояния, свързани с халюцинации или изкривено възприятие.

Този кратък обзор е генериран от изкуствен интелект

Кратко обяснение, генерирано от езиков модел по текста на CORDIS. Оригиналът е по-долу.

Резултати накратко

The implementation of predictive coding across the auditory hierarchy

In everyday life, we are constantly faced with noisy, incomplete, and ambiguous sensory information. Yet, we are usually able to perceive our environment quickly and accurately. A growing body of research suggests that the brain achieves this by actively generating predictions about what is likely to happen next and combining these expectations with incoming sensory signals. This predictive way of processing information is thought to play a central role in perception, learning, and decision-making. At the same time, there is increasing recognition that altered predictive processes may contribute to neurological and psychiatric conditions in which perception becomes unreliable, such as hallucinations or sensory distortions. Improving scientific understanding of how predictions and sensory evidence are combined in the healthy brain is therefore important not only for basic neuroscience, but also for long-term progress in mental health research and clinical innovation. The overall objective of the PredInCon project was to investigate how expectations and sensory information jointly determine what we consciously perceive, using hearing as a model system. Hearing provides an ideal test case because the auditory environment is highly dynamic and often noisy, requiring the brain to continuously anticipate and interpret incoming sounds. The project aimed to clarify how the brain can remain sensitive both to what is expected and to what is surprising, and how this balance shapes conscious experience. To address these questions, the project developed a new experimental approach in which participants listened for faint sounds embedded in background noise. Crucially, the likelihood of hearing a particular sound was systematically manipulated, allowing to separate the effects of expectation from the strength of the sensory signal itself. This design made it possible to study how prior knowledge and sensory evidence are combined during perception. By combining behavioural measurements with magnetoencephalographic data, the project set out to identify the brain processes that support this predictive form of perception. Through this approach, PredInCon contributes to European and international research priorities in brain health, cognitive neuroscience, and mental health by improving understanding of fundamental mechanisms of perception. The project’s results are expected to support the development of better theoretical models of brain function and, in the longer term, to inform research on conditions in which predictive processing may be disrupted. In this way, the project helps address the broader need for a deeper, mechanistic understanding of how the brain constructs conscious experience in complex and uncertain environments.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз

Цел на проекта

Posing the brain as a predictive system has become a guiding principle that has proven to be particularly fruitful in the study of perceptual processes. Perception is understood as an inferential process in which the brain combines its noisy sensory input with predictions generated by internal models. In this way, the contents of conscious experience would be determined by the hypothesis about the state of the world, with the highest posterior probability. One popular algorithmic incarnation of the predictive processing ideas is predictive coding, in which the brain implements a hierarchy of generative models, where feedback connections carry predictions and feedforward connections carry prediction errors. The brain would minimize these prediction error by updating its internal models. While compelling, this proposal leaves open several issues.It is not yet clear how a predictive perceptual system could be both sensitive to expected and to surprising stimuli. Bayesian integration of sensory evidence and prior probability of the hypotheses (predictions) might offer an optimal solution. But some authors have argued that Bayesian integration would result in a bias toward the expected. Therefore, the question of how conscious experience emanates from the interaction between predictions and prediction errors remains open.Predictive coding assumes separate neuronal populations representing predictions and prediction errors, which would reside in different cortical layers. This proposal remains largely untested in humans, in particular in the auditory domain.This project focuses on the auditory domain, where the ability to predict the incoming sensory stream is fundamental for making sense of everyday auditory scenes, especially in the presence of noise. I will tackle the aforementioned open questions by implementing challenging auditory signal detection tasks, and by combining fMRI data at ultra-high field (7 Tesla), and cutting-edge computational modelling.

Оригинален текст от CORDIS (на английски).

Участници

STICHTING RADBOUD UNIVERSITEIT · NijmegenКоординаторНидерландия