OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Experimental and subjective evidence shows that human perception is highly ambiguous, primarily since sensory signals often carry too little information to disambiguate different states of the world. Several theoretical accounts have provided suggestions how this ambiguity may be resolved. Theories of predictive coding suggest that nervous systems continuously generate predictions about upcoming states of the world and perception results from a comparative process of predictions and real-world sensory input. Consistent with this, the Bayesian brain hypothesis states that nervous systems encode both prior expectations and stimulus information probabilistically and that subjective percepts reflect posterior beliefs resulting from a Bayesian inference process. However, robust evidence for these hypotheses come from a limited range of experimental paradigms, often failing to provide conclusive answers and the neuronal mechanisms underlying these processes remain unclear. I will present new evidence from studies using a combination of psychophysics, magnetoencephalography and transcranial current stimulation that shed more light on how the brain integrates expectations with sensory signals.