Thesis defense Tao He (Donders series 445)

2 September 2020

promotor: prof. dr. F. de Lange

Perceiving the future: predictive processing from the eyes to the brain

Humans are visual beings. When we open our eyes, we are constantly bombarded with an enormous amount of visual information flowing from the eyes to the brain. However, our visual perception is highly selective and subjective even though we experience exactly the same physical stimuli in the world. Predictions are one important source that determines our perception. It remains unclear, however, whether and how our visual perception is influenced by certain specific forms of predictability, i.e., predictive remapping and prior context. In this thesis, Tao used fMRI, psychophysics as well as eye-tracking techniques to investigate the relationship between the predictions and perception. He found the underlying neural mechanism of prediction that can help to stabilize our visual perception when we are moving our eyes and how we are able to use prior knowledge to improve our visual perception.