will take place on Tuesday, April 8th, 2025 from 16:00 to 17:00 hours in CBBM Building, Ground Floor, Seminar Room Levi-Montalcini.
Host: Prof. Jonas Obleser
Institute of Psychology I
Abstract: Timing is a fundamental skill the brain uses to integrate information across senses and interact with dynamic environments. Despite its critical relevance, the cognitive and neural mechanisms that process time remain a significant puzzle in cognitive neuroscience. One aspect of this puzzle is implicit timing: the extraction of temporal regularities from sensory environments to form temporal predictions. Temporal predictions knowingly speed up motor and sensory responses, and enhance the sensitivity of the perceptual analysis in the auditory, visual, and tactile modality. My research focuses on the auditory domain, to which timing is of particular relevance, and has contributed to the demonstration that temporal predictions are formed automatically, even from subtle temporal regularities, and enhance pitch discrimination sensitivity. One putative neural implementation of temporal predictions is through neural oscillations in the delta band (0.5 – 3 Hz), which phase-reset with temporal cues in aperiodic and periodic environments. Throughout the talk I will focus on the question of how temporal predictions are formed from temporal statistics of sensory signals, and their representation at the cognitive and neural level. Statistical learning has been successfully addressed with Bayesian modelling in the sensory domain: an ideal observer forms an internal probabilistic model through sequential updating, but it is not yet clear whether temporal statistical learning in humans follows these principles. In two behavioral studies, we found that Bayesian observer models capture important aspects of human implicit learning of temporal statistics. However, by comparing different observer models to human reaction time data, we can show that humans also diverge from the ideal observer in important ways, notably when it comes to representing the precision of the temporal statistics. Furthermore, neural markers (pupil dilation and electroencephalography) demonstrate that humans represent the degree of uncertainty associated with the temporal statistics of external stimuli.
