How Expectations Influence Learning

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

During learning, the brain is a prediction engine that continually makes theories about our environment and accurately registers whether an assumption is true or not. A team of neuroscientists from Ruhr-Universitit Bochum has shown that expectation during these predictions affects the activity of various brain networks. Dr. Bin Wang, Dr. Lara Schlaffke and Associate Professor Dr. Burkhard Pleger from the Neurological Clinic of Berufsgenossenschaftliches Universititsklinikum Bergmannsheil report on the results in two articles that were published in March and April 2020 in the journals Cerebral Cortex and Journal of Neuroscience.

The neuroscientists identified two key regions in the brain: the thalamus plays a central role in decision-making. The insular cortex, on the other hand, is particularly active when it is clear whether the right or wrong decision has been made. "The expectation during learning then regulates specific connections in the brain and thus the prediction for learning-relevant sensory perception," says Burkhard Pleger.

[...] For the investigation, the team used a learning task that focuses on the decision-making process during the perception of skin contact in the brain. "It's like learning a computer strategy game using a game pad, which gives sensory feedback to certain fingers on certain stimuli," compares Pleger. "The point is that a certain touch stimulus leads to success and that this has to be learned from stimulation to stimulation."

28 participants were given either tactile stimulus A or B on the index finger in each trial run. At the push of a button, they then had to predict whether the subsequent tactile stimulus would be the same or not. The probability of A and B was constantly changing, which the participant had to learn from prediction to prediction.

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