Learning of schemas and making sense of complex events.

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Where am I? Who are these people and what do they want? In our everyday lives we can usually answer these questions relatively easily, although they are by no means easy questions. To comprehend what is happening in a given situation one must perceive, maintain and integrate information from multiple modalities and timescales. Our prior knowledge can play an important role in how we comprehend and remember our surroundings. For instance, walking into a library, we might expect to see a lot of books and people studying. Indeed, our prior knowledge can help us structure newly incoming information and better understand complex events. However, this crucial aspect of our conscious experience has not been examined extensively to date, since most previous psychological research has used oversimplified stimuli (e.g. single words, pictures) that cannot possibly realistically mimic our rich and varied lived experience. My thesis used video stimuli to act as an experimentally controlled substitute of real-life situations. I examined how different types of prior knowledge affect the comprehension and memory of complex events. We can have prior knowledge that is specific to a single situation - e.g. were we to start listening to a lecture having missed the beginning - or indeed our prior knowledge could be more schematic - such as our knowledge of how libraries typically work or how people normally behave. Schema knowledge is acquired over multiple exposures (e.g. with libraries), represents the common among episodes features (e.g. books, silence) and can have large influence on our perception. For instance, if we walk into a library, we expect to see people studying. In separate experiments I found evidence that both types of prior knowledge can have beneficial effects on learning new information. I have produced a publication (Raykov et al., 2019) and a pre-print (Raykov et al., 2018) from my PhD work and have unpublished results for 2 research papers. The main aims of the fellowship are to prepare these results for publication and write a timely review on prior knowledge. The fellowship would also allow me to address questions left unanswered by my thesis.My previous research has shown some of the effects of prior knowledge, however, it has not addressed how schematic knowledge develops. One of the reasons for this is that schematic knowledge is learned over multiple episodes. This means that it often is practically unfeasible to acquire data from the prolonged training period in order to investigate how individual experiences are transformed to schema knowledge.Dr Emmanuel Barbeau, through links with Prof Chris Bird, would provide me with access to data of 30 patients, whose brain activity has been recorded (with implanted electrodes) as they watched 10 episodes of a TV show over 5 days. This would allow me to test how individuals extracted information from the multiple episodes to acquire schemas. A specific prediction is that medial temporal lobe regions would track overlapping features among episodes to help schema development. This might happen by remembering previously learned information when encountering a situation with overlapping features. For instance, during our second visit to the library we might remember our first visit to the library in order to extract the information common across both visits (Schlichting & Preston, 2015). The fellowship would also allow me to run a pilot behavioural project testing how we process information that contradicts our prior knowledge. These research projects will help me in the development of larger grant proposals such as ESRC New Investigator award. Furthermore, the fellowship would allow me to acquire new research skills and organise public engagement event to disseminate my research to a wider audience.