Christoph Adami

Wednesday 16th May 2018

Time:4.00pm

Ground Floor Seminar Room

25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG

"Attentional entrainment and perceived event duration in artificial evolved brains"

Humans and other animals perceive and process rhythmic signals in an active manner, by entraining and becoming coupled to the rhythmic stimuli the environment provides. How this entrainment shapes and guides attention, however, is still not understood, with several competing theories that appear to explain available phenomenological data. I will show that artificial evolved brains that perform an auditory "oddball task" at a level comparable to human test subjects are also subject to the same duration perception distortion as the humans subjects. A detailed analysis of the logical circuitry of the artificial brains shows that contrary to standard theory, brains actually only pay attention to the tail of the stimulus, where the uncertainty is highest. This finding is consistent with visual saliency models in which attention is paid to those parts of the signal that have the highest contrast with the expected background. This analysis of auditory signal processing sheds light on how brains can use temporal patterns of information to drive the brain into a state where only a particular small subset of possible signals is expected, thus focusing attention and possible reactions to only the most appropriate of alternatives.