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Faster but less precise: expectation enhances response speed while reducing sensory fidelity.

Ziyue Hu1, Dominic M D Tran1, Reuben Rideaux2

  • 1School of Psychology, The University of Sydney, Camperdown, Australia.

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The brain balances efficiency and adaptability by processing expected events quickly for action while reducing their sensory precision to prioritize unexpected events for learning. This dual strategy optimizes sensory processing.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Computational Neuroscience
  • Sensory Processing

Background:

  • The brain efficiently processes sensory information using predictive mechanisms and internal models.
  • It remains unclear if efficiency prioritizes expected or unexpected events, each offering adaptive advantages.
  • Understanding this balance is key to explaining how the brain minimizes metabolic cost while maintaining flexibility.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether brain efficiency arises from prioritizing expected or unexpected sensory events.
  • To independently manipulate task relevance (attention) and stimulus predictability to isolate expectation effects.
  • To elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying the brain's adaptive efficiency in sensory processing.

Main Methods:

  • Combined electroencephalography (EEG), pupillometry, and behavioral measures in human participants.
  • Developed a paradigm to independently manipulate attention and stimulus predictability, controlling for low-level adaptation.
  • Employed feature-specific neural decoding to analyze pre- and post-stimulus effects of attention and expectation.

Main Results:

  • Participants responded faster and more accurately to expected events, an effect enhanced by attention.
  • Expected events were encoded with lower representational fidelity (reduced precision), independent of attention.
  • Neural decoding revealed attention's pre-stimulus effects and expectation's post-stimulus effects, with no interaction.

Conclusions:

  • The brain employs two complementary processes for leveraging environmental redundancy: early attention-mediated response to expected events and later dampened sensory response to expected events.
  • Attention enhances rapid motor responses to expected stimuli, while expectation reduces sensory precision, prioritizing unexpected stimuli for updating internal models.
  • These findings offer a unified explanation for balancing sensory processing efficiency with adaptability across different timescales.