Past experiences powerfully shape our daily perception, so our perception of the world around us not only reflects the stimuli input impinging on our senses but is also strongly shaped by what we already know. Sensory input in the real world is often ambiguous, thus incorporating prior knowledge from past experiences is particularly important for perceptual processing in realistic, complex environments. When this process goes awry, past experiences may overwhelm sensory input and cause hallucinations. Through this project, an interdisciplinary research team with expertise in cognitive neuroscience, clinical neurology, and multi-modal human brain imaging will tackle the question of how prior knowledge from past experiences guides perceptual visual processing in the human brain. The research team will further investigate individual variability in these mechanisms and test whether they have predictive power for personality traits that lie on a continuum with mental illnesses.
This project employs a robust, dramatic perceptual paradigm to shed light on how past experiences shape current perceptual processing. Combining psychophysics with cutting-edge human brain imaging technologies, this project will dissect the neural mechanisms underlying the influence of prior experience on human visual perception at the levels of local processing within a brain region, inter-areal information transmission, and large-scale brain dynamics. Further, the extent to which perception relies on prior knowledge varies across healthy individuals and psychiatric patients. This project will capitalize on variations in the general population to determine which neural mechanisms drive individual variability in the reliance of perception on prior knowledge, and further test whether such neural mechanisms can predict an individual?s propensity to psychosis.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
