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Perceptual Prediction: Rapidly Making Sense of a Noisy World

DOI:10.1016/j.cub.2019.06.054
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Clare Press at Birkbeck, University of London
Clare Press
Daniel Yon at Birkbeck, University of London
Daniel Yon
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Abstract

Prior knowledge shapes what we perceive. A new brain stimulation study suggests that this perceptual shaping is achieved by changes in sensory brain regions before the input arrives, with common mechanisms operating across different sensory areas.
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Perceptual prediction: Rapidly making sense of a noisy world
Clare Press* and Daniel Yon
Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London
* c.press@bbk.ac.uk.
Prior knowledge shapes what we perceive. A new brain stimulation study in Current Biology
suggests that this shaping is achieved by changes in sensory brain regions before the input
arrives, with common mechanisms operating across different sensory areas.
Main text
Our brains have to make sense of the vast quantities of information bombarding our senses.
The information reaching our eyes, ears and other receptors changes rapidly across space
and time, and the signals are imperfect [1]. For example, when we listen to a friend on the
metro the sound of their voice is masked by the noise of the train. Our brains must rapidly
generate a best guess about what we heard to guide our behaviour effectively – we will be a
poor conversation partner if it takes us several seconds to work out what they said. A new
study [2] shows how the brain can generate this best guess by sending predictive signals to
brain regions involved in processing sensory input.
Work from the cognitive sciences across the last few decades has demonstrated that we likely
use our expectations to help shape what we perceive. There are many statistical regularities
within our environment and we can combine these with the sensory input to inform the likely
state of the world. If our conversational partner is a fellow academic, it is more likely that they
said ‘I love computers’ than ‘I love reviewers’, and biasing our perceptual experiences in line
with these likelihoods will tend to increase their accuracy [1,3]. Biased perceptual decisions
have been shown across a number of disciplines and with a number of methods. For example,
we are faster to identify everyday household objects (e.g., loaves of bread) when they are
preceded by observation of contexts in which they are typically seen (kitchen counters; [4]),
and we are more likely to report the presence of stimuli expected on the basis of arbitrary,
probabilistically-paired cues [5]. Such biasing is also demonstrated through perceptual errors
that occur when typical regularities are disrupted. For example, we report concave faces to
have the more typical convex structure when shading cues are ambiguous [6], and that
sensations last for a similar length of time to concurrently performed actions – likely because
they typically last for comparable durations [7].
While cognitive scientists have reported for some time that perception is biased by our
expectations, the precise mechanisms realising these influences have remained elusive.
Indeed, some have even queried whether top-down knowledge really alters what we perceive
at all or rather just the decisions we make about our experiences [8]. For example, producing
slow actions may make us hallucinate that simultaneous events last for longer, because we
typically experience slow actions to be accompanied by long sensations. Alternatively, this
knowledge could just bias us to report that events have lasted for longer because we believe
they should have done, while our perceptual experiences remain unchanged. We can
disentangle these possibilities partly by using rigorous behavioural experiments that
manipulate these processes [8] and constructing computational models of the decision
process [5]. Neuroimaging methods have also been used to understand the underlying
mechanisms, e.g., examining pattern classification accuracy of sensory signals when
sensations were expected or not [9–12]. These findings have prompted suggestions that
expectations indeed influence perceptual experiences themselves via ‘pre-activation’ of
sensory units tuned to expected events before the input is received [11]. This pre-activation is
thought to lead to competitive interactions that inhibit units tuned to the unexpected, ‘turning
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up the volume’ (relative sensory gain) on expected inputs and thereby biasing perception
towards what we expect (‘sharpening’ theories; see Fig. 1).
However, it remains debated whether expectations really alter perception, partly because
these changes in sensory brain areas may not in fact play a causal role in changing perception
[13]. Gandolfo and Downing [2] addressed this question in a clever study using transcranial
magnetic stimulation (TMS). In their task, participants made rapid judgements about observed
bodies or visual scenes (e.g. is this body slim?). Stimuli were preceded by written cues to
establish expectations about which particular stimulus would be shown (e.g. ‘m’ predicted a
male body). In line with previous work, the participants were faster and more accurate when
their expectations were valid. More importantly, the authors applied TMS at the time of the
cues – disrupting activity in either the extrastriate body area (EBA) or the occipital place area
(OPA). They revealed a compelling double dissociation whereby disrupting activity in body-
selective EBA abolished behavioural expectation effects for body stimuli but not scenes, and
disrupting scene-selective OPA activity had the converse effect. Such a pattern provides
convincing evidence that effects of expectations on perceptual decisions are indeed mediated
by changes in specific sensory processing. It also provides evidence to support the idea that
these modulations are realised through pre-activating units tuned to expected inputs before
the sensory information even hits the receptors.
One particularly interesting feature of this study is the specific regions where effects are found.
EBA and OPA are considered higher level sensory processing regions encoding the complex
configurations of information that characterise bodies and scenes, respectively. Predictive
sharpening effects have sometimes been observed predominantly in primary visual cortex
[9,10], prompting suggestions that predictive influences are only realised through interactions
at the earliest points in the cortical hierarchy. However, the predictive influence identified by
Gandolfo and Downing in these late visual brain areas suggests this is unlikely to be the case,
raising the alternative possibility that previous effects have been confined to early processing
regions because these areas are most sensitive to the stimuli used in these studies, i.e.,
gratings and edges [9,see also 14].
These findings suggest that regardless of the particular sensory region, expectations may
modulate processing in a similar way. Although EBA and OPA encode different kinds of visual
information, influences of prediction appeared to be mediated through similar pre-activation
processes. In other words, the same domain-general pre-activation mechanism may sharpen
representations similarly in different domain-specific sensory regions. This finding concurs
with recent results from our lab revealing that sensory predictions operate via common
mechanisms across domains. In this instance, we demonstrated that the precise nature of the
predictive (not predicted) information did not alter the nature of effects. Specifically, visual
predictions made on the basis of action sharpened visual brain activity just like when the
predictions are furnished by arbitrary sensory cues [12]. This finding in fact conflicted with
previous reports that action expectations have a distinct influence on perception – i.e.,
dampening rather than sharpening processing of predicted inputs ([15]; it had been thought to
be for this reason that we cannot tickle ourselves [e.g., 16]). If predictive mechanisms work
similarly across domains – regardless of the particular nature of the predictive or predicted
information – then it seems logical that Gandolfo and Downing’s findings would have
implications for any domain where observers can rely on probabilistic knowledge. For
example, as well as implications for action perception and normative sensory cognition, similar
principles may explain findings from language [17] and social cognition [18] – with effects of
expectations realised through pre-activation of relevant representations in different parts of
the cortical hierarchy.
However, the idea that sensory-specific pre-activation drives our enhanced ability to identify
expected events leaves open questions about the mechanisms that generate predictive
dampening effects when these are found. Why do predictions sometimes attenuate rather than
3
sharpen perception, e.g., why can’t we tickle ourselves? These findings of attenuated rather
than enhanced processing of the expected are prominent in action control literatures but in
fact are also found elsewhere [17,19]. Similar temporally-tuned methods to those employed
by Gandolfo and Downing may prove useful in disentangling the precise nature of mechanisms
operating across the sensory hierarchy [see 20].
In conclusion, Gandolfo and Downing’s new work contributes to a lively debate about the role
of prior knowledge in shaping what we perceive. Their findings provide compelling evidence
that expectations alter perception through influences realised in specific sensory areas before
the sensory events are presented, and contribute to an emerging view that a common set of
domain-general principles may account for the effects of prediction across a host of
disciplines.
References
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3. de Lange, F.P., Heilbron, M., and Kok, P. (2018). How do expectations shape perception? Trends
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4. Palmer, S.E. (1975). The effects of contextual scenes on the identification of objects. Mem. Cogn.
3, 519–526.
5. Wyart, V., Nobre, A.C., and Summerfield, C. (2012). Dissociable prior influences of signal
probability and relevance on visual contrast sensitivity. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 109, 3593–
3598.
6. Gregory, R.L. (1970). The Intelligent Eye. New York, McGraw-Hill.
Figure 1. Combining noisy sensory input with our expectations is a powerful way to generate largely accurate
representations of our environment efficiently. Gandolfo and Downing suggest that this is achieved by pre-
activating sensory representations of expected stimuli, e.g., those of particular bodies within extrastriate body
area, such that perception is biased towards what is expected and therefore more likely to be there.
4
7. Yon, D., Edey, R., Ivry, R.B., and Press, C. (2017). Time on your hands: Perceived duration of
sensory events is biased toward concurrent actions. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 146, 182–193.
8. Firestone, C., and Scholl, B.J. (2016). Cognition does not affect perception: Evaluating the
evidence for “top-down” effects. Behav. Brain Sci. 39, e229.
9. Kok, P., Jehee, J.F.M., and de Lange, F.P. (2012). Less is more: expectation sharpens
representations in the primary visual cortex. Neuron 75, 265–270.
10. Smith, F.W., and Muckli, L. (2010). Nonstimulated early visual areas carry information about
surrounding context. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 107, 20099–20103.
11. Kok, P., Mostert, P., and Lange, F.P. de (2017). Prior expectations induce prestimulus sensory
templates. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 114, 10473–10478.
12. Yon, D., Gilbert, S.J., de Lange, F.P., and Press, C. (2018). Action sharpens sensory
representations of expected outcomes. Nat. Commun. 9, 4288.
13. Bang, J.W., & Rahnev, D. (2017). Stimulus expectation alters decision criterion but not sensory
signal in perceptual decision making. Sci. Rep. 7, 17072.
14. Alilović, J., Timmermans, B., Reteig, L.C., van Gaal, S., and Slagter, H.A. (2019). No evidence
that predictions and attention modulate the first feedforward sweep of cortical information
Processing. Cereb. Cortex 29, 2261–2278.
15. Brown, H., Adams, R.A., Parees, I. Edwards, M., and Friston, K. (2013). Active inference, sensory
attenuation and illusions. Cogn. Process. 14, 411-427.
16. Blakemore, S.J., Wolpert, D.M., and Frith, C.D. (1998). Central cancellation of self-produced
tickle sensation. Nat. Neurosci. 1, 635–640.
17. Blank, H., and Davis, M.H. (2016). Prediction errors but not sharpened signals simulate
multivoxel fMRI patterns during speech perception. PLoS Biol. 14, e1002577.
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object stimuli throughout the ventral visual stream. J. Neurosci. 38, 7452-7461.
20. Yon, D., and Press, C. (2017). Predicted action consequences are perceptually facilitated before
cancellation. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 43, 1073–1083.
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Full-text available
  • Feb 2017
Perceptual systems must rapidly generate accurate representations of the world from sensory inputs that are corrupted by internal and external noise. We can typically obtain more veridical representations by integrating information from multiple channels, but this integration can lead to biases when inputs are, in fact, not from the same source. Although a considerable amount is known about how different sources of information are combined to influence what we perceive, it is not known whether temporal features are combined. It is vital to address this question given the divergent predictions made by different models of cue combination and time perception concerning the plausibility of cross-modal temporal integration, and the implications that such integration would have for research programs in action control and social cognition. Here we present four experiments investigating the influence of movement duration on the perceived duration of an auditory tone. Participants either explicitly (Experiments 1–2) or implicitly (Experiments 3–4) produced hand movements of shorter or longer durations, while judging the duration of a concurrently presented tone (500–950 ms in duration). Across all experiments, judgments of tone duration were attracted toward the duration of executed movements (i.e., tones were perceived to be longer when executing a movement of longer duration). Our results demonstrate that temporal information associated with movement biases perceived auditory duration, placing important constraints on theories modeling cue integration for state estimation, as well as models of time perception, action control and social cognition.
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Causal Evidence for Expression of Perceptual Expectations in Category-Selective Extrastriate Regions
Article
Expectations about a visual event shape the way it is perceived [1, 2, 3, 4]. For example, expectations induced by valid cues signaling aspects of a visual target can improve judgments about that target, relative to invalid cues [5, 6]. Such expectation effects are thought to arise via pre-activation of a template in neural populations that represent the target [7, 8] in early sensory areas [9] or in higher-level regions. For example, category cues (“face” or “house”) modulate pre-target fMRI activity in associated category-selective brain regions [10, 11]. Further, a relationship is sometimes found between the strength of template activity and success in perceptual tasks on the target [12, 13, 14]. However, causal evidence linking pre-target activity with expectation effects is lacking. Here we provide such evidence, using fMRI-guided online transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). In two experiments, human volunteers made binary judgments about images of either a body or a scene. Before each target image, a verbal cue validly or invalidly indicated a property of the image, thus creating perceptual expectations about it. To disrupt these expectations, we stimulated category-selective visual brain regions (extrastriate body area, EBA; occipital place area, OPA) during the presentation of the cue. Stimulation ended before the target images appeared. We found a double dissociation: TMS to EBA during the cue period removed validity effects only in the body task, whereas stimulating OPA removed validity effects only in the scene task. Perceptual expectations are expressed by the selective activation of relevant populations within brain regions that encode the target.
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Suppressed Sensory Response to Predictable Object Stimuli throughout the Ventral Visual Stream
Article
  • Jul 2018
Prediction plays a crucial role in perception, as prominently suggested by predictive coding theories. However, the exact form and mechanism of predictive modulations of sensory processing remain unclear, with some studies reporting a downregulation of the sensory response for predictable input whereas others observed an enhanced response. In a similar vein, downregulation of the sensory response for predictable input has been linked to either sharpening or dampening of the sensory representation, which are opposite in nature. In the present study, we set out to investigate the neural consequences of perceptual expectation of object stimuli throughout the visual hierarchy, using fMRI in human volunteers. Participants of both sexes were exposed to pairs of sequentially presented object images in a statistical learning paradigm, in which the first object predicted the identity of the second object. Image transitions were not task relevant; thus, all learning of statistical regularities was incidental. We found strong suppression of neural responses to expected compared with unexpected stimuli throughout the ventral visual stream, including primary visual cortex, lateral occipital complex, and anterior ventral visual areas. Expectation suppression in lateral occipital complex scaled positively with image preference and voxel selectivity, lending support to the dampening account of expectation suppression in object perception.
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How Do Expectations Shape Perception?
Article
Perception and perceptual decision-making are strongly facilitated by prior knowledge about the probabilistic structure of the world. While the computational benefits of using prior expectation in perception are clear, there are myriad ways in which this computation can be realized. We review here recent advances in our understanding of the neural sources and targets of expectations in perception. Furthermore, we discuss Bayesian theories of perception that prescribe how an agent should integrate prior knowledge and sensory information, and investigate how current and future empirical data can inform and constrain computational frameworks that implement such probabilistic integration in perception.
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Prior expectations induce prestimulus sensory templates
Article
  • Sep 2017
Significance The way that we perceive the world is partly shaped by what we expect to see at any given moment. However, it is unclear how this process is neurally implemented. Recently, it has been proposed that the brain generates stimulus templates in sensory cortex to preempt expected inputs. Here, we provide evidence that a representation of the expected stimulus is present in the neural signal shortly before it is presented, showing that expectations can indeed induce the preactivation of stimulus templates. Importantly, these expectation signals resembled the neural signal evoked by an actually presented stimulus, suggesting that expectations induce similar patterns of activations in visual cortex as sensory stimuli.
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