Sharif Digital Repository

The human brain continuously tries to predict sensory input in order to prepare for responding to new events. The brain develops a model for the incoming sensory information and updates it as new inputs arrive. It is hypothesized that the brain deduces a distribution for the input which is made more accurate with new observations. A notable question is how the brain perceives and reacts to new information. The oddball paradigm task is a simple experiment that can reveal the brain's ability in predicting the incoming input. We analyzed the EEG response of the brain recorded during oddball visual and auditory tasks in order to characterize its response to surprising instances embedded in a... 

Having to survive in a continuously changing environment has driven the human brain to actively predict the future state of its surroundings. Oddball tasks are specific types of experiments in which this nature of the human brain is studied. Detailed mathematical models have been constructed to explain the brain's perception in these tasks. These models consider a subject as an ideal observer who abstracts a hypothesis from the previous stimuli, and estimates its hyper-parameters - in order to make the next prediction. The corresponding prediction error is assumed to manifest the subjective surprise of the brain. While the approach of earlier works to this problem has been to suggest an...