Brain meeting: Thomas Parr

Brain meeting

Active inference is a theoretical framework that treats action and perception as inferential processes. These rely upon the use of an internal (generative) model that can be used to explain current sensory input, and to predict future sensations. This approach has been successfully applied to reproduce a range of behavioural, psychophysical, and neurobiological findings. This talk will unpack some of these in the context of the active visual system. Specifically, we will consider how the inferential message passing implied by a generative model of the visual world could manifest in the anatomy of the oculomotor system, in visual search behaviour, and in pathological inferences in clinical populations. A key example of the latter is in visual neglect, a syndrome resulting from damage to the right cerebral hemisphere in which active visual exploration of the left side of space is impaired. This syndrome illustrates the importance of action in healthy perceptual inference. It highlights the need to understand the complex interplay between action and perception in studying inferential pathologies.

 There will be coffee, tea and cake in the conservatory directly after the talk.