# Hierarchies of spatiotemporal anticipation in the human brain

> **NIH EY R01** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY · 2026 · $296,969

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
Everyday experience requires humans to make plans in a hierarchical fashion, so they can anticipate visual
events that might occur seconds, minutes, hours, or longer in the future. For example, when walking through a
city, individuals must track their immediate surroundings (e.g., the movement of pedestrians around them),
intermediate sub-goals (e.g., landmarks along their route), and long-timescale goals (e.g., their final destination).
Despite the ubiquity of such hierarchical anticipation in behavior, it is unclear how the brain can simultaneously
anticipate events at multiple timescales. Our aim is to uncover the mechanisms underlying hierarchical
anticipatory signals in the brain’s visual system, by determining how these signals form, what they represent,
how they are updated, and how they guide future-oriented behavior. This will be accomplished with functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), neuropsychological studies, naturalistic stimuli, computational models, and
sophisticated analytic approaches for characterizing the dynamics of brain activity. These methods will determine
the conditions under which the visual system generates hierarchical anticipatory signals, the content and
flexibility of those signals, how they arise, and their consequences for behavior. Aim 1 will establish how
hierarchical anticipatory signals form and what they represent. We hypothesize that such hierarchical anticipation
depends on input from memory systems, is informed by pre-existing schema, and is flexible in the visual features
and timescales represented. Aim 2 will determine how hierarchical anticipatory signals may be affected by top-
down goals to simulate the future, and how these signals relate to future-oriented visual behavior at a range of
timescales. We hypothesize that the visual hierarchy differentially updates its anticipatory signals when the
environment or goals change, and generates predictive signals in novel situations by linking separate e

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 11374979
- **Project number:** 5R01EY034436-05
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY
- **Principal Investigator:** Mariam  Aly; Christopher  Baldassano
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** EY
- **Fiscal year:** 2026
- **Award amount:** $296,969
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2023-03-01T00:00:00 → 2028-02-28T00:00:00

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/11374979

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 11374979, Hierarchies of spatiotemporal anticipation in the human brain (5R01EY034436-05). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-20 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/11374979. Licensed CC0.

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