Statistical learning attenuates visual activity only for attended stimuli
Source
Elife, 8, (2019), article e47869ISSN
Publication type
Article / Letter to editor
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Organization
PI Group Predictive Brain
SW OZ DCC BO
SW OZ DCC CO
Journal title
Elife
Volume
vol. 8
Languages used
English (eng)
Subject
180 000 Predictive Brain; Action, intention, and motor controlAbstract
Perception and behavior can be guided by predictions, which are often based on learned statistical regularities. Neural responses to expected stimuli are frequently found to be attenuated after statistical learning. However, whether this sensory attenuation following statistical learning occurs automatically or depends on attention remains unknown. In the present fMRI study, we exposed human volunteers to sequentially presented object stimuli, in which the first object predicted the identity of the second object. We observed a reliable attenuation of neural activity for expected compared to unexpected stimuli in the ventral visual stream. Crucially, this sensory attenuation was only apparent when stimuli were attended, and vanished when attention was directed away from the predictable objects. These results put important constraints on neurocomputational theories that cast perception as a process of probabilistic integration of prior knowledge and sensory information.
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
- Academic publications [204887]
- Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging [3428]
- Electronic publications [103214]
- Faculty of Social Sciences [27346]
- Open Access publications [71770]
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