The workings of the human mind have been a topic of active debate among philosophers for millennia, and more recently, also in modern science. Over the past few decades, advances in non-invasive brain imaging methods, including EEG and fMRI, have permitted real-time examination of the brain mechanisms supporting mental processes and behavior. This approach has yielded tremendous insights into human cognition and its neurobiological basis, giving rise to the interdisciplinary field of cognitive neuroscience. So far, most cognitive neuroscience research has focused on identifying the specific brain systems involved in cognitive functions, such as attention and memory, and even consciousness, assuming a functional architecture of serial information processing stages from sensory to cognitive to motor control stages, each subserved by distinct regions and networks in the brain. However, over the past decade or so, it has become apparent that the boundaries between brain systems and the functions they support are blurry at best. For example, activity in visual brain regions, traditionally associated with visual information processing, has been shown to reflect memories and actions to be made, i.e. not visual input per se. This has led to a conceptual revolution in psychology and neuroscience and the embracement of theoretical notions in which the brain is not treated as an information-processing system, but approached as an information-generating system, which continuously tests competing hypotheses about the world through (mental) action. This perspective, which resonates with action-oriented views of perception and cognition, assigns crucial importance to action: because the brain lacks direct access to the outside world, predictions can only be tested by generating information through action. Thereby, perception is strongly shaped by predictions about the sensory outcomes of actions and may even constitutively rest on action. Goal-directed cognitive processes are similarly understood as internal predictive activity serving information generation, but covertly and over longer time scales (they are mental actions). Moreover, in this perspective, in contrast to long held notions of the adult brain as a rather static organ, emphasis is placed on the plasticity of the brain, as it continuously adapts based on new experiences and changes in the structure of the generated input. Indeed, parallel developments in the field of cognitive neuroscience indicate that even the adult brain may undergo continuous changes in response to sensory input, associations, reward signals, motor acts, and even awareness itself.
In a time where our conception of the brain is moving rapidly towards an information and prediction generating system, in which learning through (mental) action is central, it becomes crucial to investigate it as such. This ERC project aims to do so to enhance our understanding of the plasticity and action-oriented nature of perception and cognition. It specifically examines how, at the neural level, self-generated (mental) action influences how we (learn to) perceive the world around us using an innovative combination of psychophysics, neuroimaging, virtual reality, and modelling in healthy individuals and expert meditators.
The research program comprises four projects, investigating 1) how we learn to predict the sensory outcomes of our actions and how this shapes perception; 2) the hypothesis that perception constitutively rests on action; 3) the plasticity of the higher-order cognitive operations that comprise mental actions; and 4) the control that people may exert over such mental actions. This promises to provide an integrative framework for understanding the neural mechanisms and plasticity of action-oriented perception and cognition, with clear clinical implications.
