Alejandro Tabas

Keywords: perceptual inference, predictive processing, auditory system, subcortical pathways, neural modelling, ultra-high-resolution fMRI.

Perceiving the world around us is extraordinarily complex. Consider hearing: from a degraded mixture of auditory signals we manage to understand dialogues and to experience music. To do this, our brain needs to use the knowledge it acquired in the past to fill in the information that is missing in the auditory signals: to infer the auditory objects that produce what we are hearing. The Lab for Perceptual Inference uses high-resolution neuroimaging techniques and computational neural modelling to understand the neural mechanisms responsible for this process. Our goal is to understand how our subjective priors and expectations shape our experience of reality.

Alejandro studied Theoretical Physics and Artificial Intelligence in Madrid, Vienna, and Barcelona. In 2017 he obtained his PhD in Computational Neuroscience at Bournemouth University, UK. He did his first postdoc in Cognitive Neurosicence in the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, and in the Technische Universität Dresden, Germany. In 2022 Alejandro started a second postdoc in Computational Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, UK. In 2023 he was awarded an ERC Starting Grant to study perceptual inference in subcortical pathways. He moved to the BCBL in March 2024 as the Head of the Lab for Perceptual Inference.