Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité Paris, France ; CNRS, Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, UMR 8242 Paris, France.
Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä Jyväskylä, Finland.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2014 Mar 26;8:152. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00152. eCollection 2014.
The brain as a proactive system processes sensory information under the top-down influence of attention and prediction. However, the relation between attention and prediction remains undetermined given the conflation of these two mechanisms in the literature. To evaluate whether attention and prediction are dependent of each other, and if so, how these two top-down mechanisms may interact in sensory processing, we orthogonally manipulated attention and prediction in a target detection task. Participants were instructed to pay attention to one of two interleaved stimulus streams of predictable/unpredictable tone frequency. We found that attention and prediction interacted on the amplitude of the N1 ERP component. The N1 amplitude in the attended/predictable condition was larger than that in any of the other conditions. Dipole source localization analysis showed that the effect came from the activation in bilateral auditory areas. No significant effect was found in the P2 time window. Our results suggest that attention and prediction are dependent of each other. While attention might determine the overall cortical responsiveness to stimuli when prediction is involved, prediction might provide an anchor for the modulation of the synaptic input strengths which needs to be operated on the basis of attention.
大脑作为一个主动系统，在注意力和预测的自上而下的影响下处理感觉信息。然而，由于文献中对这两种机制的混淆，注意力和预测之间的关系仍未确定。为了评估注意力和预测是否相互依赖，如果是，这两种自上而下的机制如何在感觉处理中相互作用，我们在目标检测任务中正交地操纵了注意力和预测。参与者被指示注意两个交错的可预测/不可预测音调频率刺激流之一。我们发现注意力和预测在 N1 ERP 成分的振幅上相互作用。在注意/可预测条件下的 N1 振幅大于任何其他条件下的 N1 振幅。偶极子源定位分析表明，这种效应来自双侧听觉区域的激活。在 P2 时间窗口未发现显著影响。我们的结果表明注意力和预测是相互依赖的。当涉及到预测时，注意力可能决定了皮质对刺激的整体反应性，而预测则可能为基于注意力的突触输入强度的调制提供一个锚点。
