Linking Temporal Anticipation to Reward Expectation: a Neuro-Computational Framework of Fast Human Cognition

• Applicant: Matthias Grabenhorst, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 562627320

The anticipation of future events facilitates fast actions. In everyday life, humans balance the rewards of fast actions with their costs. This occurs rapidly, often within a few hundred milliseconds, e.g. in communication, in traffic, in music, in fighting, in sports. Which neural processes underlie such fast cognition? This is a fundamental biological question that is also of clinical relevance: the same brain systems that integrate temporal information, shape attention, form decisions and prepare motor actions are functionally limited in neurodegenerative diseases and impair cognition and adequate behavior. This proposal advances cognitive and systems neuroscience by determining how motivating effects expected reward shape the temporal anticipation of sensory cues. The involved computations are of considerable relevance in neuroscience as they link environmental reward parameters to timing behavior. However, reward expectation and temporal anticipation are typically not investigated together. Consequently, fast goal-driven behavior - a key function underlying many domains of cognition - is not well understood. Different from previous approaches, the proposed experiments determine the role of reward expectancy in temporal anticipation and elucidate potential interactions between the two functions. We develop a new approach using targeted experiments: We manipulate the temporal statistics of sensory events and independently vary reward statistics. We model behavior and study neural activity with magnetoencephalography. First, we determine the individual effects of static and dynamic reward probabilities on anticipatory behavior. Second, guided by our models of behavior, we separate effects of reward probability from temporal event anticipation in neural activity. We focus on parietal association areas, prefrontal areas and sensorimotor cortex. This will illuminate how the brain represents abstract information based on sensory input in the service of fast reward-based actions. Taken together, we establish novel links between reward expectation and temporal anticipation and their neural mechanisms. We develop a biologically plausible account of fast human cognition based on computational primitives.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: USA
• Co-Investigators: Georgios Michalareas, Ph.D.; Professor David Poeppel, Ph.D.
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Charles Gallistel, Ph.D.; Professor Laurence T. Maloney, Ph.D.