Attention Reverses the Effect of Prediction in Silencing Sensory Signals

By F. D. de Lange, Peter Kok, Dobromir Rahnev, Janneke F. M. Jehee, H. Lau. 2011

420 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Predictive coding models of perception suggest that predicted sensory signals are attenuated (silencing of prediction error). These models, though influential, are challenged by the fact that prediction sometimes enhances, rather than reduces task-relevant sensory signals, as in the case of spatial cueing experiments. One possible explanation is that in these experiments, prediction (i.e. whether a stimulus is likely to be presented) is confounded with attention (i.e. whether a stimulus requires a behavioural response), which is known to boost rather than reduce sensory signal. However, recent theoretical work on predictive coding inspires an alternative hypothesis, and suggests that attention and prediction may operate synergistically to improve the precision of perceptual inference. This model posits that attention leads to heightened weighting of sensory evidence, thereby reversing the sensory silencing by prediction. We factorially manipulated attention and prediction in an fMRI study to test the validity of this model. Our results support a predictive coding model wherein attention reverses the sensory attenuation of predicted signals. This may explain the seemingly contradictory findings in the literature regarding the effects of prediction on neural responses.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Theory of Mind: A Neural Prediction Problem (2013, positive): “Finally, Kok et al., (2012a) distinguished the effects of prediction from effects of attention, by manipulating the participants’ task.”
Canonical microcircuits for predictive coding. (2012, positive): “The resulting attentional modulation (e.g., Hopfinger et al., 2000) can interact with top-down predictions to override their suppressive influence, as demonstrated empirically (Kok et al., 2012).”
An aberrant precision account of autism (2014, positive): “However, this repetition suppression can be reversed by attention (Kok et al., 2012)—an effect that can be attributed to an (attentional) increase in sensory precision (Feldman and Friston, 2010).”
How Prediction Errors Shape Perception, Attention, and Motivation (2012, background): “Remarkably, there is a robust cortical response to such surprising stimulus omissions in the relevant sensory cortical areas (den Ouden et al., 2009; Todorovic et al., 2011; Wacongne et al., 2011; Kok et al., 2012b).”
Repetition Suppression and Expectation Suppression Are Dissociable in Time in Early Auditory Evoked Fields (2012, background): “Further empirical support for this scheme is provided by a recent study that showed that expected visual stimuli lead to attenuated neural activity, yet improve the fidelity (sharpness) of the sensory representation in the primary visual cortex (Kok et al., 2012a).”
Contextual factors multiplex to control multisensory processes (2016, background): “…given that such associations only emerge when these dimensions are relevant to the observer [Crump et al., 2008; Jim enez and M endez, 1999; see also Auksztulewicz and Friston, 2015; Kok et al., 2012; Larsson and Smith, 2012 for evidence on interactions between topdown attention and expectations].”