Modality-specific predictive templates in pre-stimulus EEG activity

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Decision Science

Background:

• Perceptual decision-making integrates sensory input with prior beliefs.
• Anticipating event timing and likelihood is crucial for timely actions.
• While neural signatures of anticipation exist, their generalization to uncued trials and prediction of decision strategy shifts remain unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if human participants anticipate visual or auditory stimuli at the single-trial level.
• To determine if pre-stimulus brain activity (EEG) contains stimulus-specific anticipation information.
• To examine if decoded anticipation predicts trial-by-trial decision strategy changes.

Main Methods:

• Utilized electroencephalography (EEG) to record pre-stimulus brain activity.
• Applied single-trial classification to identify neural signatures of anticipation in both cued and uncued trials.
• Conducted behavioral analyses to link anticipation accuracy with decision strategy shifts (e.g., drift-rate).

Main Results:

• Pre-stimulus EEG activity successfully predicted the expected upcoming stimulus.
• Classification of anticipation generalized from cued to uncued trials, indicating expectation formation without explicit cues.
• Accurate anticipation correlated with specific shifts in decision-making strategies.

Conclusions:

• Single-trial, stimulus-specific neural signatures of anticipation are present in human brain activity.
• Expectations can form and be neurally encoded even in the absence of explicit cues.
• These findings offer novel insights into the neural basis of trial-to-trial variability in decision-making.