How generative brains distinguish imagination from reality
How do we know that what we see is real and not just imagined? Our perception of reality is generative: to resolve ambiguous sensory input, our brain predicts the most likely interpretation using an internal model built on past experiences. This same top-down mechanism can be used to generate sensory signals in the absence of input to generate mental imagery. Mental imagery is used to support a wide range of cognitive processes such as memory, navigation and planning. While an efficient use of neural resources, the neural overlap between perception and imagery can cause confusions regarding the source of perceptual experiences under certain circumstances. During this talk, I will discuss our work on how the brain maintains the precarious balance between being able to generate high-fidelity imagery on the one hand while still maintaining a firm grip on reality on the other hand.
Biography
Nadine is a principal research fellow at the Department of Imaging Neuroscience (the FIL), University College London, where she leads the Imagine Reality Lab. She studied psychology and cognitive neuroscience before completing a PhD in artificial intelligence at the Donders Institute in the Netherlands. Her research aims to understand the relationship between mental imagery and perception in the human brain by using a combination of psychophysics, neuroimaging, machine learning and computational modeling.