Abstract
Anticipating the future rests upon our ability to exploit contextual cues and to formulate valid internal models or predictions. It is currently unknown how multiple predictions combine to bias perceptual information processing, and in particular whether this is determined by physiological constraints, behavioral relevance (task demands), or past knowledge (perceptual expertise). In a series of behavioral auditory experiments involving musical experts and non-musicians, we investigated the respective and combined contribution of temporal and spectral predictions in multiple detection tasks. We show that temporal and spectral predictions alone systematically increase perceptual sensitivity, independently of task demands or expertise. When combined, however, spectral predictions benefit more to non-musicians and dominate over temporal ones, and the extent of the spectrotemporal synergistic interaction depends on task demands. This suggests that the hierarchy of dominance primarily reflects the tonotopic organization of the auditory system and that expertise or attention only have a secondary modulatory influence.
Highlights
Prominent theories in neuroscience assume that brain neural activity is shaped by one’s perceptual, behavioral and emotional experiences and reflects historically informed internal models of causal dynamics in the world, that serve to generate predictions of future sensory events[1,2,3]
In the visual and auditory systems, retinotopic and tonotopic organizations are respectively preserved throughout the hierarchy of sensory processing stages, allowing for a common reference frame centered around one dimensional feature space[16,17]
Attentional priority is internally represented as a hierarchical structure that dynamically adjusts to reflect task demands
Summary
Prominent theories in neuroscience assume that brain neural activity is shaped by one’s perceptual, behavioral and emotional experiences and reflects historically informed internal models of causal dynamics in the world, that serve to generate predictions of future sensory events[1,2,3]. It remains largely unknown how predictions are encoded in the brain in particular because they are essentially multidimensional. We reasoned that if multidimensional predictions are organized according to a fixed canonical model (physiological constraints or attentional priority), we should not observe qualitative difference between the two groups of musical expertise in their ability to exploit and combine predictions. We examined how priors belonging to temporal and spectral dimensions combine and whether this depends on behavioral relevance or perceptual expertise
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