Unraveling the Brain’s Process for Predicting the Future



Associate Professor Jeffrey M. Zacks studies
 the brain’s process for predicting the future. (David Kilper)


Every day we make thousands of tiny predictions — when the bus will arrive, who is knocking on the door, whether the dropped glass will break. Now researchers are unraveling the process by which the brain makes these prognostications.

Predicting the near future is vital in guiding behavior, says Jeffrey M. Zacks, PhD, associate professor of psychology.

“It’s valuable to be able to run away when the lion lunges at you, but it’s ­super valuable to be able to hop out of the way before the lion jumps,” he says.

Zacks and his colleagues believe that a good part of predicting the future is maintaining a mental model of what is happening now. Occasionally this model needs updating, especially when the environment changes unpredictably.

In the study, volunteers watched movies of everyday events such as washing a car or building a LEGO model. When researchers stopped the movie, participants predicted what would happen next.

Sometimes the movie stopped when a new occurrence was about to take place. Other times, the researchers stopped the movie in the middle of an event. They found that participants correctly ­predicted activity within the event more than 90 percent of the time; they correctly predicted across the event boundary less than 80 percent of the time.

Zacks says the experiments offer hope of targeting prediction-based ­updating mechanisms to better diagnose early stage neurological diseases and provide tools to help patients.

Read more about this study in the university’s Newsroom