Predictive Modelling in Audition

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Erich Schröger
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2009 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 103974738

I plan to research how we make sense of and predict the world. For example, as I sit at my desk, I can see and hear things outside and inside the office, act to make things happen, and anticipate what is going to happen. To study how we do these things, I focus on predictive modelling in hearing. I want to challenge two traditional views and to synthesize a new perspective on the mental processes involved. One view is over the system automatically encoding and monitoring rules inherent in what we hear. I hypothesize that this system is especially suited to deriving predictions about forthcoming sounds from regularities in current sounds. The other view is over the system attenuating self-generated sounds via internal forward modelling. I hypothesize that this system is highly flexible and extends beyond motor behavior. Moreover, I plan to bring out the similarities in both systems, in that both establish and test predictions, and to compare them to predictive modelling in other domains such as implicit learning and attentive rule processing. The planned research takes an experimental approach with an emphasis on chronometric functional aspects (tapped by behavioral measures, event-related potentials, and oscillatory EEG activity) but will also consider structural aspects (tapped by functional imaging). On a larger scale, this research will help to establish the essential role of predictions in the cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience of information processing.

• DFG Programme: Reinhart Koselleck Projects