Predictive enhancement and inhibition in the context of actions

选择、抑制和预测是紧密交织在一起的机制，构成了理解认知的核心原则。这个项目的主要目标是在一个共同的实验范式中研究这些机制对知觉和视觉运动控制的功能重要性，确定它们是如何相关的，分析它们如何适应不同的任务，并阐明它们的神经机制。该项目的第一部分将确切地研究不同的注意信号，一方面与目标定向的眼睛和手的运动准备有关，另一方面与自上而下和自下而上的注意有关，在注意图中，该图如何在眼睛运动中动态更新。在第二部分中，我们将研究视觉运动任务中选择和抑制之间的交互作用，该任务既需要选择运动目标，也需要抑制非目标刺激，并分析目标和干扰因素的可预测性对选择和抑制机制的影响。最后，该项目的第三部分将把实验方法扩展到视觉搜索任务，在视觉搜索任务中，有效的搜索需要抑制显著但与任务无关的感觉信息。在这里，我们想要探索预测是否以及如何在视觉搜索中也与自动刺激驱动的注意定向(包括隐蔽和公开的)相互作用。这项研究将填补我们在前向模型和预测编码理论中对预测和注意力的理解的空白。

Selection, inhibition, and prediction are closely intertwined mechanisms that constitute core principles for the understanding of cognition. The main objective of this project is to study in a common experimental paradigm the functional importance of these mechanisms for perception and visuomotor control, define how they are related, analyze how they adapt to different tasks, and elucidate their neural mechanisms. The first part of the project will investigate exactly how the different attentional signals, related to the preparation of goal-directed eye and hand movements on the one hand, and to top-down and bottom-up attention on the other, are combined in an attentional map, how this map is dynamically updated across eye movements. In a second part we will study the interaction between selection and inhibition in visuomotor tasks that require both the selection of a movement target and the inhibition of non-target stimuli, and we will analyze the effects of predictability of target and distractors on selection and inhibition mechanisms. Finally, the third part of the project will extend the experimental approach to visual search tasks in which efficient search requires the suppression of salient but task-irrelevant sensory information. Here we want to explore whether and how prediction interacts also with automatic stimulus-driven attentional orienting (both covert and overt) in visual search. This research will fill a gap in our understanding of prediction and attention within the forward model and predictive coding theories.