Neural repetition suppression reflects fulfilled perceptual expectations

• Published in: Nature neuroscience Vol. 11; no. 9; pp. 1004 - 1006
• Main Authors: Summerfield, Christopher, Trittschuh, Emily H, Monti, Jim M, Mesulam, M-Marsel, Egner, Tobias
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Nature Publishing Group US 01.09.2008; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: Adult; Alzheimer's disease; Animal Genetics and Genomics; Behavioral Sciences; Biological Techniques; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biomedicine; Brain - blood supply; Brain - physiology; Brain Mapping; brief-communication; Evoked potentials (Electrophysiology); Female; Humans; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted - methods; Likelihood Functions; Magnetic resonance imaging; Magnetic Resonance Imaging - methods; Male; Neurobiology; Neurosciences; Oxygen - blood; Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology; Photic Stimulation - methods; Physiological aspects; Reaction Time - physiology; Repression, Psychology; Sensory receptors; Time Factors; Young Adult; France; United States; Paris France
• ISSN: 1097-6256; 1546-1726
• DOI: 10.1038/nn.2163

Repetition suppression, the reduction in neural activity with repeated stimuli, is usually thought to be a result of automatic sensory processes. This study instead finds that this reduction results from high stimulus predictability, a more 'top-down' process. Stimulus-evoked neural activity is attenuated on stimulus repetition (repetition suppression), a phenomenon that is attributed to largely automatic processes in sensory neurons. By manipulating the likelihood of stimulus repetition, we found that repetition suppression in the human brain was reduced when stimulus repetitions were improbable (and thus, unexpected). Our data suggest that repetition suppression reflects a relative reduction in top-down perceptual 'prediction error' when processing an expected, compared with an unexpected, stimulus.