Virtual: Brain meeting: Professor Yael Niv

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No two events are alike. But still, we learn, which means that we implicitly decide what events are similar enough that experience with one can inform us about what to do in another. My lab has suggested that this relies on an implicit parsing of incoming information into “clusters” according to inferred hidden (latent) causes. Moreover, we have suggested that unexpected information (that is, a prediction error) is key to this separation into clusters. In this talk, I will demonstrate these ideas through behavioural experiments showing evidence for clustering in animals and humans, and illustrating the effects of prediction errors on the organisation of memory. I will attempt to tie the different findings together into a hypothesis about how information about events is organised in our brain.