Timescales of Context in the Mind and Brain

Chris Honey, Johns Hopkins University

Abstract

I study how people integrate information over time, as they seek to understand their environment and learn from it. Temporal integration is ubiquitous, because our world unfolds over time: hearing a fragment of sound, we perceive it as part of a mockingbird’s melody; reading one word, we understand it as part of a larger sentence, or an unfolding abstract. I will introduce the notion of mental context and its relationship to memory. Second, I will review empirical findings and computational models describing how regions of the cerebral cortex integrate new input with context from many seconds earlier; we will also examine how and when cortical regions "forget" prior context, and how temporal integration processes are knowledge-dependent.