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Poster Session B: Wednesday, August 13, 1:00 – 4:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Subjective, more than objective, expectation and surprise explain perceptual decisions during learning

Jessye Clarke¹, Kirsten Rittershofer¹, Daniel Yon, Clare Press¹; ¹University College London, University of London

Presenter: Jessye Clarke

Under popular ‘predictive coding’ accounts in cognitive neuroscience, the brain continuously generates predictions about sensory input and integrates them with incoming signals in order to form a percept. There is evidence that these perceptual predictions and corresponding prediction errors can be entirely implicit. However, we are selectively aware of some violations of objective statistical structure - triggering conscious experiences of surprise. In order to investigate the influence of this subjective awareness on learning and perception, we conducted two behavioural studies pairing a probabilistic perceptual discrimination task with trial-by-trial ratings of subjective expectation (Experiment 1) and surprise (Experiment 2). We found that the subjective experience associated with predictions and prediction errors can explain independent variance in behaviour to that explained by the ‘objective’ expectedness or prediction error parameter of a learning model. This suggests that beyond just the presence of a statistically probable or improbable event, subjective awareness of statistical regularities or prediction errors influences downstream stimulus processing and behavioural responses during perception and learning.

Topic Area: Predictive Processing & Cognitive Control

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