Perception Where Past and Future Meet

2017.02.13 We take our perception as truth. But what ends up in our mindscape is far from veridical. We are fooled in many ways. We believe our perception is complete, giving us access to all of the rich details of our external environment as it unfolds. We believe our perception is reactive, with incoming sensory stimulation initiating activity in our brain. We assume our perception starts and lives in the present, bringing in the unravelling world afresh. Drawing from experiments in cognitive neuroscience, this lecture shows us how these strong intuitions are illusory and argues that a much more limited and biased form of perception provides the basis for guiding our adaptive behavior. Speaker Kia Nobre Head of Department of Experimental Psychology; Chair in Transitional Cognitive Neuroscience, Oxford University