expectancy

Expectancy and Attention

The symposium starts at 3:00 p.m.

Summary description of the symposium

There is recent growing evidence that, rather than passively responding to sensory stimuli, the brain actively picks up and exploits the statistical regularities that govern the appearance of stimuli in space and time or their association with rewards. These regularities allow generating expectancies about incoming inputs and minimizing the discrepancy between predicted and observed sensory events.

In this symposium, the speakers will summarise recent behavioural, neuropsychological, electrophysiological and fMRI evidence highlighting how in the human brain the deployment of attention is adaptively modulated by the probabilistic distribution of sensory events and rewards. Research in this field is rapidly moving and reshaping consolidated views on attentional control.

The first speaker, Leonardo Chelazzi, will discuss the impact of reward in the enhancement of visual salience and in the automatic control of attention.

The second speaker, Fabrizio Doricchi, will focus on how expectancies based on spatial and timing regularities of sensory events modulate brain activity related to the anticipatory and reflexive components of spatial attention. Special emphasis wiil be devoted to the hemispheric lateralization of these mechanisms and the implications for the interpretation of the neglect syndrome.

The third speaker, Simone Vossel, will offer new insights on the computational interplay among the different brain areas that regulate the continuos updating of attentional expectancies.

Finally, Giuseppe Vallar will lead the final discussion, wrapping up the contributions of the symposium and sketching out relevant open questions and future lines of research.

References:

Hickey, Chelazzi et al. (2010). Reward changes salience in human vision.  J.Neurosci 30: 11096-103.

Doricchi et al. (2010). Neural correlates of the spatial and expectancy components of endogenous and stimulus-driven orienting. Cer Cortex, 20: 1574-585.

Vossel et al. (2015). Cortical coupling reflects Bayesian belief updating in the deployment of spatial attention. J.Neurosci 35: 11532-542.