Ongoing Activity of the Brain: A Timing-Based Approach to Perception and Memory

The human mind is constantly engaged in predicting the future using past experiences to anticipate what is likely to happen next. The predictive coding approach focuses on this ongoing activity and proposes a unified mechanism that underlies both perception and action. In this paper, we showthat some applications of the predictive coding model to memory and perception processes often face the ambiguity of two controversial aspects. (I) How can the brain apply similar mechanisms to handle qualitatively different degrees of prediction (e.g. imaginative and procedural predictions)? (II) How is it possible to reconcile the presence of stable mental representations with the continuous dynamic change of perceptual data? We suggest that the relation between different degrees of prediction can be seen as analogous to the relation between a perception and its recollection, and we argue that this relation can be better understood within a timing-based approach that looks at the temporal architectures underlying these cognitive phenomena. Therefore, based on the interpretation of some empirical data from the study of auditory perception, we show how the timing-based approach we delineate can help to clarify aspects (I) and (II).