
Emily ThomasBirkbeck, University of London · Department of Psychological Sciences
Emily Thomas
BSc Psychology, MSc Brain & Cognition
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11
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Introduction
Currently a PhD student looking at how action predictions shape perception, using psychophysics and fMRI methods.
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Publications
Publications (11)
‘Predictive processing’ frameworks of cortical functioning propose that neural populations in different cortical layers serve distinct roles in representing the world. There are distinct testable theories within this framework that we examined with a 7T fMRI study, where we contrasted responses in primary visual cortex (V1) to expected (75% likely)...
Perceivers can use past experiences to make sense of ambiguous sensory signals. However, this may be inappropriate when the world changes and past experiences no longer predict what the future holds. Optimal learning models propose that observers decide whether to stick with or update their predictions by tracking the uncertainty or “precision” of...
For decades, classic theories of action control and action awareness have been built around the idea that the brain predictively ‘cancels’ expected action outcomes from perception. However, recent research casts doubt over this basic premise. What do these new findings mean for classic accounts of action? Should we now ‘cancel’ old data, theories a...
For decades, classic theories of action control and action awareness have been built around the idea that the brain predictively ‘cancels’ expected action outcomes. However, recent research casts doubt over this basic premise. What do these new findings mean for classic accounts of action? Should we now ‘cancel’ old data, theories and approaches ge...
Perceivers can use past experiences to make sense of ambiguous sensory signals. However, this may be inappropriate when the world changes and past experiences no longer predict what the future holds. Optimal learning models propose that observers decide whether to stick with or update their predictions by tracking the uncertainty or ‘precision’ of...
It is widely believed that predicted tactile action outcomes are perceptually attenuated. The present experiments determined whether predictive mechanisms always generate attenuation, or instead can enhance perception – as typically observed in sensory cognition domains outside of action. We manipulated probabilistic expectations in a paradigm ofte...
Research suggests that responses to pictures of manipulable objects are facilitated when the location of the response is aligned with the side of the object handle. One interpretation of alignment effects is that object identification results in the automatic activation of actions associated with the object. Alignment effects are, however, not ubiq...