Jonathan Edward Robinson

Monash University (Australia) · Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies

Embodied cognition—the idea that mental states and processes should be understood in relation to one’s bodily constitution and interactions with the world—remains a controversial topic within cognitive science. Recently, however, increasing interest in predictive processing theories among proponents and critics of embodiment alike has raised hopes...

Predictive coding theories assert that perceptual inference is a hierarchical process of belief updating, wherein the onset of unexpected sensory data causes so-called prediction error responses that calibrate erroneous inferences. Given the functionally specialised organisation of visual cortex, it is assumed that prediction error propagation inte...

The foetal period constitutes a critical stage in the construction and organisation of the mammalian nervous system. In recent work, we have proposed that foetal brain development is supported by bottom-up (interoceptive) inputs from spontaneous physiological rhythms such as the heartbeat (Corcoran et al., in press). Here, we expand this visceral a...

Embodied cognition – the idea that mental states and processes should be understood in relation to one’s bodily constitution and interactions with the world – remains a controversial topic within cognitive science. Recently, however, increasing interest in predictive processing theories amongst proponents and critics of embodiment alike has raised...

Sometimes agents choose to occupy environments that are neither traditionally rewarding nor worth exploring, but which rather promise to help minimise uncertainty related to what they can control. Selecting environments that afford inferences about agency seems a foundational aspect of environment selection dynamics-if an agent can't form reliable...

Identifying the faces of familiar persons requires the ability to assign several different images of a face to a common identity. Previous research showed that the occipito‐temporal cortex, including the fusiform and the occipital face areas, is sensitive to personal identity. Still, the viewpoint, facial expression, and image‐independence of this...

Sometimes agents choose to occupy environments that are neither traditionally rewarding or worth exploring, but which rather promise to help minimise uncertainty related to what they can control. Selecting environments that afford inferences about agency seems a foundational aspect of environment selection dynamics – if an agent can’t form reliable...

Onset primacy is a behavioural phenomenon whereby humans identify the appearance of an object (onset) with greater efficiency than other kinds of visual change, such as the disappearance of an object (offset). The default mode hypothesis explains this phenomenon by postulating that the attentional system is optimised for onset detection in its init...

The prospective identification of children likely to develop schizophrenia is a vital tool to support early interventions that can mitigate the risk of progression to clinical psychosis. Electroencephalographic (EEG) patterns from brain activity and deep learning techniques are valuable resources in achieving this identification. We propose automat...

Predictive coding theories of perception highlight the importance of constantly updated internal models of the world to predict future sensory inputs. Importantly, such theories suggest that prediction-error signalling should be specific to the violation of predictions concerning distinct attributes of the same stimulus. To interrogate this as yet...

Predictive coding theories of perception suggest the importance of constantly updated internal models of the world in predicting future sensory inputs. One implication of such models is that cortical regions whose function is to resolve particular stimulus attributes should also signal prediction violations with respect to those same stimulus attri...

Achieving viable representational models of the world is the fundamental goal of perception. Such models guide thought and action, and provide the scaffolding for interpreting future sensation. Predictive coding models emphasise the role of such representations in generating perceptual hypotheses that are tested against incoming sensory data to eff...

Prediction‐error checking processes play a key role in predictive coding models of perception. However, neural indices of such processes have yet to be unambiguously demonstrated. To date, experimental paradigms aiming to study such phenomena have relied upon the relative frequency of stimulus repeats, and/or “unexpected” events that are physically...

It has been suggested that the brain pre-empts changes in the environment through generating predictions, although real-time eletrophysiological evidence of prediction violations in the domain of visual perception remain elusive. In a series of experiments we showed participants sequences of images that followed a predictable implied sequence or wh...

A recently established index of prediction errors in visual perception offers a means to investigate the processes underlying the formation of perceptual predictions. In two EEG experiments, we investigated the potential Bayesian-like parameters determining the reassessment of predictions. We manipulated the visual stimuli, both in terms of accumul...

The N170 ERP is considered to index structural encoding of faces (stimulus driven, bottom-up processing), prior to identity recognition, which is influenced by higher order cognitive factors. The face N170 is not generally seen as an index of identity recognition or considered to be cognitively penetrable. Here, we sought to test this conception of...

It has been suggested that the brain pre-empts changes in the visual environment through generating predictions, although real-time eletrophysiological evidence of prediction violations remains elusive. In a series of experiments we showed participants sequences of images that followed a predictable implied sequence or whose final image violated th...

Identifying familiar faces is a fundamentally important aspect of social perception that requires the ability to assign very different (ambient) images of a face to a common identity. The current consensus is that the brain processes face identity at approximately 250-300ms following stimulus onset, as indexed by the N250 event related potential. H...

Although traditionally associated with stimulus driven processes, we have demonstrated the N170 visual event related potential to be strongly modulated by contextually mediated expectations. Using a novel MEG beamformer metric (the Difference Stability Index: DSI) we explored the spatiotemporal bases of the "expectancy violation M170" signal. Parti...