Updating Contextual Sensory Expectations for Adaptive Behavior.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science
• Psychology

Background:

• The brain forms predictive models using environmental regularities, leading to neural "expectation suppression" for expected stimuli.
• Contextual changes necessitate belief updating, a process often overlooked in expectation research.
• It remains unclear if belief updating selectively serves adaptive behavior by prioritizing task-relevant expectations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how contextual visual expectations are updated across the cortical hierarchy.
• To determine if belief updating mechanisms selectively influence task-relevant expectations for adaptive behavior.
• To examine the neural basis of flexible expectation deployment in dynamic environments.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to observe brain activity.
• Participants learned context-dependent object image sequences in a volatile environment.
• Two tasks assessed expectation suppression for task-relevant and task-irrelevant expectations.

Main Results:

• Contextual expectation suppression emerged progressively across the cortical hierarchy.
• Initial suppression was observed in the insula, inferior frontal gyrus, and posterior parietal cortex.
• Suppression later appeared in the ventral visual stream and early visual cortex, selectively for task-relevant expectations.

Conclusions:

• An insular and frontoparietal executive control network guides the flexible updating of sensory expectations.
• This network facilitates adaptive behavior by prioritizing task-relevant contextual information.
• The findings illuminate neural mechanisms for adapting predictions in complex, dynamic environments.