Thesis defense Joey Zhou (Donders series 560)

23 June 2022

Promotor: Prof. dr. Floris de Lange
Co-promotors: Dr. Saskia Haegens, Dr. Janneke Jehee

Learning to Perceive and Perceiving to Learn: How learning and prediction shape sensory processing

Although "life is like a box of chocolates", our perceptual experience is rather structured and predictable. For example, it is highly likely to hear thunder after seeing the lightning. Indeed, knowledge about the environment's structure (or statistical regularities) enables us to better perceive and interact with the environment. How do we learn the statistical regularities of the environment? Using a combination of neuroimaging and computational modeling methods, my PhD thesis work aims to provide answers to the following questions: How does the brain exploit the learned statistical regularities in perception? What are the neural mechanisms supporting learning and exploitation?