Darinka Trübutschek
Of moments and memories: How subjective perception and experience shape one another
The Brain Dynamics Graduate School invites you to the second keynote lecture at the Scientific Day '24:
Dr Darinka Trübutschek
Research Group Neural Circuits, Consciousness, and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt
“Of moments and memories: How subjective perception and experience shape one another in the human brain”
24th September 2024, 16:30
BBZ Seminar room
Deutscher Platz 5, 04103 Leipzig
Abstract:
Our subjective experience is a dynamic interplay between what we perceive in the moment and what we remember from the past. Though this relationship has been recognized at least since Helmholtz and has shaped many theories of neural computation, in cognitive neuroscience, information processing and storage are still largely treated in isolation by separate research communities. In this talk, I will present recent behavioral and neural evidence revealing how perception and memory shape one another in the human brain and discuss the implications for our understanding of brain function.
First, I will explore how subjective perception influences memory, demonstrating that conscious perception is neither sufficient nor necessary for information storage in working memory. Even a fully attended object undergoes compression, with some attributes lost in the transition from perception to memory. I will also show that non-conscious information can be maintained, learned, and predicted in working memory—typically without sustained neural activity—challenging the view that working memory is exclusively tied to conscious perception.
Next, I will highlight how memory shapes perception, showing that past experience influences both what and how we perceive. Recent visibility history can prime perception, affecting the likelihood of perceiving masked stimuli. Moreover, I will discuss how the immediate past biases current perception, revealing a stable, individual-specific “perceptual phenotype,” where some individuals' perceptions are consistently attracted to, while others’ are repelled from, the recent past. This opens new avenues for understanding the neural mechanisms underlying perception-memory interactions.
Through this work, we gain insight into how the brain may transform moments of experience into memories and how, in turn, those memories shape our perception of the present. This research may help lay the groundwork for a much-needed unified theory of perception and memory in the human brain.