Real-world regularities get carved in our brains into what we call semantic information. This type of information is represented in a wide range of areas across the entire brain and, as a consequence, it is very likely to impact several cognitive processes.
Tracing specific semantically-loaded stimuli across different cognitive processes will give us new insights into the computations that underlie them. In this project we are combining behavioral data with eye movements recordings to study:
Scene and object conscious perception
Object identification
Episodic memory formation
One of the assumptions of predictive processing accounts is that high-order representations, and/or structures, send information downwards (i.e., feedback signals) to lower levels on the processing hierarchy. However, the nature of those high-order representations is still unknown.
In this project we point at memory traces as a candidate source of predictions. Using fMRI and functional retinotopy we aim at relating stored memory representations to feedback signals in the early visual cortex. Moreover, using high field fMRI we are tracing the feedback signals from episodic memories down to the layer level.
Unexpected events are more informative than expected ones by mere definition: unexpected events carry information that the system could not anticipate and, therefore, are a perfect situation for our brains to update their knowledge. Conversely, fully expected events can be seamlessly integrated within our schemas, thus facilitating their processing and leading, in turn, to an easier access from memory.
In this project we aim at exploring this apparent contradiction by assessing the effects that different degrees of prediction fulfillment have on the acquisition of new information and the updating of previous knowledge.
Detecting that two or more incompatible representations are active at the same time (i.e., cognitive conflict) triggers a myriad of rather short-term adjustments that affect immediate performance. From transient up-regulations of attention to block-wise proactive control recruitment, cognitive conflict seems to put our system into a different mode that entails more careful processing of upcoming information. However, only in the past 10 years, the long lasting consequences of those short-lived adjustments have been focus of extensive research.
In this (paradigm-broad) project we aim at relating transient shifts in attention to episodic memory formation.