Research Areas

Medical Sciences Division Themes

• Neuroscience
• Behavioural Science
• Imaging

Neuroscience Sub-Themes

• Human Psychology, Mental Health and Psychiatry
• Systems, Cognitive and Behavioural Neuroscience
• Functional Brain Imaging

Email	christopher.summerfield@psy.ox.ac.uk
Department	Department of Experimental Psychology
College	Wadham College

Our research aims to understand the biological basis for decision-making in humans, using non-invasive brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalograhy (EEG). Subjects in our experiments typically make simple decisions about visual stimuli: for example, they might be shown a blurry, hard-to-see image, and asked whether they can see a face or another object. We are particularly interested in how subjects' expectations about what is likely to be present ('prior information') influences their perceptual judgement, and where prior information might be stored in the brain during decision-making. Our recent work has suggested that expectation-related signals arise from ventral portions of the frontal cortex, including the orbitofrontal cortex, and may feed back to modulate activity in visual cortex during perceptual decision-making, even when these expectations are held implictly, i.e. are independent of overt attentional processes. In future work, we hope to define more clearly the relationship between expectations and attention in perceptual decision-making.