Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, 4072 Brisbane, Australia.
Centre for Advanced Imaging, The University of Queensland, 4072 Brisbane, Australia.
Cereb Cortex. 2018 May 1;28(5):1771-1782. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhx087.
Predictive coding posits that the human brain continually monitors the environment for regularities and detects inconsistencies. It is unclear, however, what effect attention has on expectation processes, as there have been relatively few studies and the results of these have yielded contradictory findings. Here, we employed Bayesian model comparison to adjudicate between 2 alternative computational models. The "Opposition" model states that attention boosts neural responses equally to predicted and unpredicted stimuli, whereas the "Interaction" model assumes that attentional boosting of neural signals depends on the level of predictability. We designed a novel, audiospatial attention task that orthogonally manipulated attention and prediction by playing oddball sequences in either the attended or unattended ear. We observed sensory prediction error responses, with electroencephalography, across all attentional manipulations. Crucially, posterior probability maps revealed that, overall, the Opposition model better explained scalp and source data, suggesting that attention boosts responses to predicted and unpredicted stimuli equally. Furthermore, Dynamic Causal Modeling showed that these Opposition effects were expressed in plastic changes within the mismatch negativity network. Our findings provide empirical evidence for a computational model of the opposing interplay of attention and expectation in the brain.
预测编码假设人类大脑持续监测环境中的规律并检测不一致性。然而，目前尚不清楚注意力对预期过程有何影响，因为相关研究相对较少，而且这些研究的结果存在相互矛盾的发现。在这里，我们采用贝叶斯模型比较来对两种替代的计算模型进行裁决。“对立”模型指出，注意力对预测和未预测的刺激的神经反应增强程度相等，而“交互”模型则假设注意力对神经信号的增强取决于可预测性的水平。我们设计了一种新颖的、听觉空间注意力任务，通过在注意力集中或不集中的耳朵中播放异常序列来正交地操纵注意力和预测。我们使用脑电图观察了所有注意力操作的感觉预测误差反应。至关重要的是，后验概率图显示，总体而言，对立模型更好地解释了头皮和源数据，表明注意力同等地增强了对预测和未预测刺激的反应。此外，动态因果建模表明，这些对立效应在不匹配负波网络内的可塑性变化中得到了表达。我们的研究结果为大脑中注意力和预期相互作用的计算模型提供了经验证据。
