You turn around slowly, heart racing, sweat beading, and…
A tiny black pug, no bigger than your hand, is backing slowly away across a lawn three yards away, barking up a storm but retreating and shaking as it goes.
You laugh, and carry on, not realising that you just learned something. What just happened, you see, was a prediction error.
“The immediate effect of this prediction error is to update our belief from thinking there is a big dog to there being a tiny dog,” explains Peter Kok, a senior research fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at University College London (UCL). “The more long-term effect is that we update our model of the world: loud barks don’t always come from big dogs.”
In neuroscience, a so-called “prediction error” occurs when an expected event fails to materialise. Such incidents cause a range of metacognitive functions to leap into action that force us to re-examine our initial flawed expectations and ask ourselves what we can learn from our errors.
Floris de Lange, a professor at the Radboud University in the Netherlands, reveals that prediction errors can arise from a number of different brain stimuli. They can be sensory – for example, a visual surprise such as a sudden flash; or they can even be semantic. He gives an example of the sentence “the soup was too hot to cry” – the last word elicits surprise because our brains had predicted a different end.
この記事は TES の September 27, 2018 版に掲載されています。
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7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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