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Male AG, O’Shea RP. Attention is required for canonical brain signature of prediction error despite early encoding of the stimuli. PLoS Biol 2023; 21:e3001866. [PMID: 37339145 PMCID: PMC10281583 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3001866] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/24/2022] [Accepted: 05/11/2023] [Indexed: 06/22/2023] Open
Abstract
Prediction error is a basic component of predictive-coding theory of brain processing. According to the theory, each stage of brain processing of sensory information generates a model of the current sensory input; subsequent input is compared against the model and only if there is a mismatch, a prediction error, is further processing performed. Recently, Smout and colleagues found that a signature of prediction error, the visual (v) mismatch negativity (MMN), for a fundamental property of visual input-its orientation-was absent without endogenous attention on the stimuli. This is remarkable because the weight of evidence for MMNs from audition and vision is that they occur without endogenous attention. To resolve this discrepancy, we conducted an experiment addressing 2 alternative explanations for Smout and colleagues' finding: that it was from a lack of reproducibility or that participants' visual systems did not encode the stimuli when attention was on something else. We conducted a similar experiment to that of Smout and colleagues. We showed 21 participants sequences of identically oriented Gabor patches, standards, and, unpredictably, otherwise identical, Gabor patches differing in orientation by ±15°, ±30°, and ±60°, deviants. To test whether participants encoded the orientation of the standards, we varied the number of standards preceding a deviant, allowing us to search for a decrease in activity with the number of repetitions of standards-repetition suppression. We diverted participants' attention from the oriented stimuli with a central, letter-detection task. We reproduced Smout and colleagues' finding of no vMMN without endogenous attention, strengthening their finding. We found that our participants showed repetition suppression: They did encode the stimuli preattentively. We also found early processing of deviants. We discuss various explanations why the earlier processing did not extend into the vMMN time window, including low precision of prediction.
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Affiliation(s)
- Alie G. Male
- Discipline of Psychology, College of Science, Health, Engineering and Education, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia
- Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, School of Medicine, University of California, Irvine, United States of America
| | - Robert P. O’Shea
- Discipline of Psychology, College of Science, Health, Engineering and Education, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia
- Wilhelm Wundt Institute for Psychology, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany
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Stein J, von Kriegstein K, Tabas A. Predictive encoding of pure tones and FM-sweeps in the human auditory cortex. Cereb Cortex Commun 2022; 3:tgac047. [PMID: 36545253 PMCID: PMC9764222 DOI: 10.1093/texcom/tgac047] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/05/2022] [Revised: 11/05/2022] [Accepted: 11/10/2022] [Indexed: 11/17/2022] Open
Abstract
Expectations substantially influence perception, but the neural mechanisms underlying this influence are not fully understood. A prominent view is that sensory neurons encode prediction error with respect to expectations on upcoming sensory input. Although the encoding of prediction error has been previously demonstrated in the human auditory cortex (AC), previous studies often induced expectations using stimulus repetition, potentially confounding prediction error with neural habituation. These studies also measured AC as a single population, failing to consider possible predictive specializations of different AC fields. Moreover, the few studies that considered prediction error to stimuli other than pure tones yielded conflicting results. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to systematically investigate prediction error to subjective expectations in auditory cortical fields Te1.0, Te1.1, Te1.2, and Te3, and two types of stimuli: pure tones and frequency modulated (FM) sweeps. Our results show that prediction error is elicited with respect to the participants' expectations independently of stimulus repetition and similarly expressed across auditory fields. Moreover, despite the radically different strategies underlying the decoding of pure tones and FM-sweeps, both stimulus modalities were encoded as prediction error in most fields of AC. Altogether, our results provide unequivocal evidence that predictive coding is the general encoding mechanism in AC.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Katharina von Kriegstein
- Chair of Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology, Technical University Dresden, Bamberger Str. 7, Dresden 01187, Germany
| | - Alejandro Tabas
- Chair of Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology, Technical University Dresden, Bamberger Str. 7, Dresden 01187, Germany
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Gorina-Careta N, Zarnowiec K, Costa-Faidella J, Escera C. Timing predictability enhances regularity encoding in the human subcortical auditory pathway. Sci Rep 2016; 6:37405. [PMID: 27853313 PMCID: PMC5112601 DOI: 10.1038/srep37405] [Citation(s) in RCA: 17] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/17/2016] [Accepted: 10/27/2016] [Indexed: 11/24/2022] Open
Abstract
The encoding of temporal regularities is a critical property of the auditory system, as short-term neural representations of environmental statistics serve to auditory object formation and detection of potentially relevant novel stimuli. A putative neural mechanism underlying regularity encoding is repetition suppression, the reduction of neural activity to repeated stimulation. Although repetitive stimulation per se has shown to reduce auditory neural activity in animal cortical and subcortical levels and in the human cerebral cortex, other factors such as timing may influence the encoding of statistical regularities. This study was set out to investigate whether temporal predictability in the ongoing auditory input modulates repetition suppression in subcortical stages of the auditory processing hierarchy. Human auditory frequency–following responses (FFR) were recorded to a repeating consonant–vowel stimuli (/wa/) delivered in temporally predictable and unpredictable conditions. FFR amplitude was attenuated by repetition independently of temporal predictability, yet we observed an accentuated suppression when the incoming stimulation was temporally predictable. These findings support the view that regularity encoding spans across the auditory hierarchy and point to temporal predictability as a modulatory factor of regularity encoding in early stages of the auditory pathway.
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Affiliation(s)
- Natàlia Gorina-Careta
- Institute of Neurosciences, University of Barcelona, P. Vall d'Hebron 171, 08035, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.,Brainlab - Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group, Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology, University of Barcelona, P. Vall d'Hebron 171, 08035, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.,Institut de Recerca Sant Joan de Déu, Santa Rosa 39-57, 08950, Esplugues de Llobregat, Catalonia, Spain
| | - Katarzyna Zarnowiec
- Institute of Neurosciences, University of Barcelona, P. Vall d'Hebron 171, 08035, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.,Brainlab - Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group, Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology, University of Barcelona, P. Vall d'Hebron 171, 08035, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
| | - Jordi Costa-Faidella
- Institute of Neurosciences, University of Barcelona, P. Vall d'Hebron 171, 08035, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.,Brainlab - Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group, Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology, University of Barcelona, P. Vall d'Hebron 171, 08035, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
| | - Carles Escera
- Institute of Neurosciences, University of Barcelona, P. Vall d'Hebron 171, 08035, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.,Brainlab - Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group, Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology, University of Barcelona, P. Vall d'Hebron 171, 08035, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.,Institut de Recerca Sant Joan de Déu, Santa Rosa 39-57, 08950, Esplugues de Llobregat, Catalonia, Spain
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López-Caballero F, Zarnowiec K, Escera C. Differential deviant probability effects on two hierarchical levels of the auditory novelty system. Biol Psychol 2016; 120:1-9. [DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2016.08.001] [Citation(s) in RCA: 9] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/06/2016] [Revised: 06/16/2016] [Accepted: 08/02/2016] [Indexed: 11/25/2022]
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