Helen Blank | “I know you! Hierarchical predictive processing in speech and face perception”
Systems and cognitive neuroscience \ Manfred Eigen lecture theatre
How does the brain resolve sensory ambiguity? By combining computational modeling, fMRI, and EEG across speech and face perception, we identify a unified hierarchical principle of predictive processing. In both domains, prior expectations exert dual influences: they sharpen sensory representations in early processing regions to facilitate identification, while triggering prediction errors in higher-level areas when expectations are violated. Our findings reveal that the brain integrates precision-weighted priors to bias behavior and eye movements, demonstrating that sharpening and prediction errors coexist across hierarchical networks to ensure both efficient recognition and adaptive learning.