'Premembering' Perception in the human brain.

Every time you walk into a room, your brain has already started guessing what you will see before your eyes send it any information. This project asks how the brain combines long-term experience—like knowing that chairs usually have four legs—with immediate goals, such as looking for your friend in a crowd, to prepare neural activity for what comes next. The gap is this: we know that expectations shape perception, but we do not understand how the brain blends two different kinds of expectation—those built from a lifetime of experience and those set by a current task—into a single, flexible prediction that guides what we see and how we act. This is fundamental science. If it succeeds, it will reveal the neural mechanisms behind a core feature of human perception: the ability to anticipate a dynamic world without being locked into rigid predictions. That understanding could eventually inform artificial vision systems or help explain why perception breaks down in conditions like schizophrenia or autism, where predictive processing may go awry. But for now, the aim is simply to map how the brain "premembers" what it expects to perceive.