No two events are exactly alike. But still, we learn, which means that we implicitly decide what events are similar enough that experience with one can inform us about what to do in another. Yael Niv and her colleagues have suggested that this relies on an implicit parsing of incoming information into ‘clusters’ according to inferred hidden (latent) causes. Moreover, they have proposed that unexpected information (that is, a prediction error) is key to this separation into clusters.
In this talk, Niv will demonstrate these ideas through behavioral experiments showing evidence for clustering in animals and humans and by illustrating the effects of prediction errors on the organization of memory. Finally, she will tie the different findings together into a hypothesis about how our brains organize information about events. More details: www.simonsfoundation.org/even...