Subproject 6

Neurocognitive mechanisms of uninstructed dynamic belief updating and pre-clinically relevant interindividual differences in infancy

PI:	Prof. Dr. Ulf Liszkowski

With little life experience and scant cultural knowledge, how do infants make sense of their environments and develop adaptively? It has been proposed that infants are naturally equipped to detect statistical regularities. However, most research has focused on deterministic scenarios and infants’ detection of discrete violations of expectations. Much less is known about how infants adapt to volatile (i.e. noisy, changing) environments – the arguably ecologically more valid case – and how they form and update their models from scratch. Indeed, still little is known about how adults detect structure from scratch in new environments, especially when they have not been informed about underlying assumptions or structures of a task. The current project aims to investigate how infants calibrate their predictions in noisy environments (i.e. prediction errors as parametric reactions to expected uncertainty); and how infants revise their inner models when no longer supported by evidence (i.e. dynamic belief updating as reaction to change points during unexpected uncertainty). In addition, it investigates how adults spontaneously update their beliefs in volatile environments when there are no explicit instructions about accuracy and change points, and no feedback cues to previous and current predictions. We will employ neurophysiological measures (pupillometry, heart rate, EEG) in an experimental approach, and assess individual differences regarding early social learning and temperament as factors relevant to adaptive and aberrant development. The project will provide new insights into developmentally basic processes and mechanisms of adapting spontaneously to changes in a new environment. It will chart new territory in exploring clinically relevant differences in the early development of these basic abilities.