Event overview
Daniel will offer an explanation for why our experience of the world around us is sometimes dominated by our beliefs, and sometimes focuses on information that surprises us.
"The perceptual prediction paradox: Seeing what we expect (and what we don’t)".
From the noisy information bombarding our senses our brains must construct percepts that are veridical – reflecting the true state of the world – and informative – conveying the most important information for adjusting our beliefs and behaviour.
Theories in cognitive science suggest both of these challenges are met by mechanisms that use our beliefs and prior knowledge to shape what we perceive. However, current models are mutually incompatible.
In this talk, I will contend that ideas from research on learning and inference may resolve this paradox – explaining why our experience of the world around us is sometimes dominated by our existing beliefs, and sometimes focuses on information that surprises us the most.
Brief Bio:
Daniel Yon is a new lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Goldsmiths. He studied psychology as an undergraduate at the University of Oxford (2010-2013) before completing an MSc and PhD at Birkbeck, University of London (2013-2017). Daniel was a postdoc at Birkbeck for two more years before joining Goldsmiths in September 2019. His research uses a mixture of behavioural, neuroimaging and computational methods to investigate how we perceive and interact with the world around us, with a particular focus on how our expectations shape our perceptions and decisions.
Everyone is welcome to this Whitehead lecture
( https://www.gold.ac.uk/cccc/whitehead/ ) on
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
---|---|---|
13 Nov 2019 |
4:00pm - 5:00pm Everyone is welcome. |
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