Anna Bleser

I am a PhD in the Attention and Prediction Group and my research focuses on how false prior beliefs influence how people update their internal models of the world. The predictive brain relies on prediction errors as a form of feedback to update its internal model of the world. This process helps us improve our predictions over time and adapt to changing or volatile environments. The optimal approach would be to find a balance between updating the internal model too fast even when the environment did not change and being too stable, i.e., ignoring evidence that signals a real change in the environment. In practice the decision of whether to update or not is affected by the person’s estimate of volatility. So what would happen if people rely on false information about the volatility of the environment? Together with Paola Mengotti I will be investigating this using a mixture of computational modeling of behavior and fMRI.