Talk Benedetto De Martino (CISA Seminar)

28.04.2026 12:15 – 13:15

Credit where blame is due: how the brain learns from ambiguous feedback

Imagine you are a doctor and your patient isn't getting better. Did you get the diagnosis wrong, or is the diagnosis correct but the drug isn't working? This problem extends well beyond medicine: whenever we fail, the brain receives an error signal, but the source of that signal is often ambiguous. In this talk, I will present two studies that investigate how humans deal with this ambiguity. In the first (Okamoto et al., 2025), errors could reflect either poor skill or bad luck. We show that people display a systematic self-attribution bias, taking credit for successes and blaming failures on chance. Computational modelling reveals that this bias is partly driven by the brain distorting its own perception of ability, yet surprisingly, this distortion does not affect confidence. The second study (in preparation) extends this to a perceptual task where errors can occur at two hierarchical levels: selecting the wrong task dimension or misperceiving the correct one. Using a combination of fMRI, MEG, and intracranial recordings, we examine how the brain responds to different hierarchical levels of the task and assigns credit across them. Together, these studies investigate how the brain parses error in the messy, ambiguous environments we actually live in.


ON SITE

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Zoom :

https://unige.zoom.us/j/66873810837?pwd=TSEnpNm3PaAJoYLU3Mx9THb0LnzCO2.1
Meeting ID: 668 7381 0837
Passcode: 124349

Lieu

Bâtiment: Campus Biotech

H8-01-D

entrée libre