School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, QLD, 4072, Australia.
School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, QLD, 4072, Australia.
Neuroimage. 2018 Jun;173:351-360. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.02.068. Epub 2018 Mar 30.
Incidental learning affords a behavioural advantage when sensory information matches regularities that have previously been encountered. Previous studies have taken a focused approach by probing the involvement of specific candidate brain regions underlying incidentally acquired memory representations, as well as expectation effects on early sensory representations. Here, we investigated the broader extent of the brain's sensitivity to violations and fulfilments of expectations, using an incidental learning paradigm in which the contingencies between target locations and target identities were manipulated without participants' overt knowledge. Multivariate analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging data was applied to compare the consistency of neural activity for visual events that the contingency manipulation rendered likely versus unlikely. We observed widespread sensitivity to expectations across frontal, temporal, occipital, and sub-cortical areas. These activation clusters showed distinct response profiles, such that some regions displayed more reliable activation patterns under fulfilled expectations, whereas others showed more reliable patterns when expectations were violated. These findings reveal that expectations affect multiple stages of information processing during visual decision making, rather than early sensory processing stages alone.
偶然学习在感官信息与先前遇到的规律相匹配时提供了行为优势。先前的研究采用了一种集中的方法，通过探测在偶然获得的记忆表现背后特定候选大脑区域的参与，以及对早期感官表现的期望效应。在这里，我们使用一种偶然学习范式研究了大脑对违反和满足期望的更广泛的敏感性，在这种范式中，目标位置和目标身份之间的关联在参与者没有明显知识的情况下进行了操纵。我们应用功能磁共振成像数据的多元分析来比较在偶然的学习范式中，在依赖关系操纵使得视觉事件更有可能发生与不太可能发生的情况下，神经活动的一致性。我们观察到了广泛的跨额、颞、枕和皮质下区域的期望敏感性。这些激活聚类显示出不同的反应模式，例如，一些区域在满足期望时表现出更可靠的激活模式，而其他区域在违反期望时表现出更可靠的模式。这些发现表明，期望影响视觉决策过程中多个信息处理阶段，而不仅仅是早期的感官处理阶段。
