Brain Meeting: Oliver Warrington

Please contact ion.fil.brainmeetings@ucl.ac.uk for a Zoom link.

The way we perceive the world is profoundly affected by our prior experiences. By constantly exploiting the statistical regularities in our environment, we form perceptual predictions that help us infer the cause of the sensory information we receive. The hippocampus has been suggested to play a pivotal role in learning environmental statistics and exploiting them to generate perceptual predictions. However, the mechanisms whereby the hippocampus learns such predictions remain unclear, as does its potential role in communicating predictions to the sensory cortex.

In this talk, I will present work from my PhD here at the FIL, where I have used high-resolution 7T fMRI to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying perceptual predictions. I will cover the development of a submillimetre fMRI protocol to scan the challenging MTL cortex, the use of subfield- and layer-specific analyses to determine the direction of communication between the hippocampus and neocortex, predictions for stimulus detection, and finally, some reflections on my FIL PhD adventure.