Dr. Darinka Trübutschek - How subjective perception and past experience shape one another скачать в хорошем качестве

Dr. Darinka Trübutschek - How subjective perception and past experience shape one another

Talk given by Dr. Darinka Trübutschek at IfaDo on March 18th, 2025. Abstract: How does the human brain transform neural signals into the rich subjective experiences that define our reality? Despite centuries of philosophical and scientific inquiry, the neural mechanisms underlying subjective perception remain one of neuroscience’s greatest unsolved problems. I propose that progress on this question requires unraveling the dynamic interplay between perception and memory - how past experiences shape what we perceive in the moment and how those moments become embedded in memory. In this talk, I will present a synthesis of findings from behavioral experiments, electrophysiology, and computational modeling to shed light on how subjective experience emerges through the interaction of perception and memory. First, I will demonstrate that conscious perception is not necessary for storing information in working memory. Instead, genuine non-conscious working memory allows us to maintain, learn, and use information - even in the absence of subjective experience and sustained neural activity. These findings challenge long-standing theories that equate working memory with consciousness, suggesting a broader role for non-conscious perception in working-memory dependent cognition. Building on this, I will demonstrate how memory not only stores our past experiences but actively shapes what we perceive in the present. Remarkably, these biases exhibit stable, individual-specific patterns - a ‘perceptual phenotype’, with some individuals consistently perceiving the present as drawn toward their recent past, while others perceive it as repelled. These individual differences may offer a novel framework for identifying the neural mechanisms driving attractive and repulsive perceptual biases. Together, my work provides a foundation for understanding how the brain transforms moments of experience into memories and how those memories, in turn, influence our perception of the present. Ultimately, I hope that it will lead towards a mechanistic theory of how perception and memory shape each other in the human brain, thereby offering a novel lens through which to explore the neural basis of subjective experience.