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Updated: Jun 26, 2026

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies
Published on: May 9, 2019
Neural repetition suppression reflects fulfilled perceptual expectations
Christopher Summerfield1, Emily H Trittschuh, Jim M Monti
1INSERM U742, Université Pierre et Marie Currie, 9 Quai St. Bernard, 75005 Paris, France.
Abstract:
Stimulus-evoked neural activity is attenuated on stimulus repetition (repetition suppression), a phenomenon that is attributed to largely automatic processes in sensory neurons. By manipulating the likelihood of stimulus repetition, we found that repetition suppression in the human brain was reduced when stimulus repetitions were improbable (and thus, unexpected). Our data suggest that repetition suppression reflects a relative reduction in top-down perceptual 'prediction error' when processing an expected, compared with an unexpected, stimulus.
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