A/Prof

Hinze Hogendoorn

Principal Research Fellow In Psychology

Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences

The University of Melbourne

Abstract:

We feel that we perceive events in the environment as they unfold in real-time. However, this intuitive view of perception is impossible to implement in the nervous system due to biological constraints such as neural transmission delays. In this talk, I will propose a new way of thinking about real-time perception, in which perceptual mechanisms represent an entire timeline, rather than individual timepoints. On this timeline, predictive mechanisms predict ahead to compensate for delays in incoming sensory input, and reconstruction mechanisms retroactively revise perception when those predictions do not come true. This addresses a crucial gap in our understanding of a fundamental aspect of our everyday life: how our brains enable the experience of perceiving the present.

Bio:

I am a Principal Research Fellow at the Melbourne School of Psychological Science (University of Melbourne), where I lead the Time in Brain and Behaviour Laboratory. Previously, I was Assistant Professor in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. My primary research interests lie in the time-course of visual processing and visual perception. By combining psychophysical, behavioural, computational and neuroimaging techniques, I investigate questions such as how the brain keeps track of time and how the brain functions in real-time. I am currently especially interested in how the brain solves the computational problems that result from its own internal delays.

Webinar Link: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/s/83347424497