Il giorno 19 Febbraio 2024, presso il Laboratorio di Neuroscienze Cognitive e Psicologia, Viale Allegri 13, Reggio Emilia, alle ore 11:30, il dottor Antonino Visalli, terrà un seminario dal titolo: Bayesian modeling of temporal expectations in the human brain.
Di seguito l'abstract del seminario e una breve biografia del dott Visalli
ABSTRACT
In the last decades, we have witnessed a paradigm shift in cognitive (neuro)science towards considering the brain as a predictive machine. According to the Bayesian Brain hypothesis, the brain represents information as posterior probabilities, which are derived by integrating likelihoods of newly gained information with prior probabilities, that is, previously held (prior) beliefs. The first part of the talk will provide a general introduction to this framework showing the reasons for the use of Bayesian inference in modeling human perception, cognition and action.
The main part of the talk will provide an extensive example of the application of the Bayesian brain framework to a fundamental information processing, namely, temporal predictions. The ability to generate accurate predictions about the timing of forthcoming events is essential to temporally optimize cognitive processes ranging from perception to action selection. Mathematically, temporal predictions have been described in terms of the hazard function (i.e., the conditional probability that an event will occur given it has not yet occurred). It follows that temporal expectations are encoded on the basis of both the information inherent in elapsed time and “prior” beliefs about event timing. However, how the brain forms and updates prior temporal beliefs was an unsettled question. I will present a series of pioneering studies that addressed this unexplored aspect by combining a Bayesian computational approach with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). This research project showed that two cognitive-control networks were in part distinctly associated with two different information-theory measures: updating and surprise. The same distinction was also present at the EEG level with two dissociable P3-like modulations specifically indexing belief updating and surprise about the timing of events.
In the last part, the talk will focus on some preliminary steps to cast proactive and reactive cognitive control modes under the Bayesian framework.
BIOGRAPHY
Antonino Visalli is currently a research fellow at the IRCCS San Camillo Hospital in Venice (IT).
He graduated cum Laude in Cognitive Neuroscience and Clinical Neuropsychology in 2015 at the University of Padova and earned a PhD in Psychological Sciences in 2019 at the same University with a thesis awarded as “Best PhD thesis” by the Italian Psychological Association. After a research fellowship at Hannover Medical School (2018-2019), he undertook postdoctoral research at the Department of General Psychology (2019-2020) and at the Department of Neuroscience (2020-2022) at the University of Padova.
His main research interests concern the investigation of the neural correlates supporting Bayesian inference especially in the field of timing and cognitive control. To study these topics, he uses different techniques such as psychophysics, computational modeling, neuroimaging (fMRI), and neurophysiology (EEG). He has received several awards and grants for his research work.
He is an expert in experimental methodology and data analysis, and he is actively involved in developing novel methodologies for cognitive neuroscience. He has an active engagement in open science (OSF score: 1085) and he is member of networks and multicenter projects promoting transparent and reproducible research methods.