Do actions structure auditory memory? Action-based event segmentation effects on sensory responses, pupil dilation and sequential memory.

Our actions shape our everyday experience: what we experience, how we perceive, and remember it are deeply affected by how we interact with the world. Performing an action to deliver a stimulus engages neurophysiological processes which are reflected in the modulation of sensory and pupil responses. We hypothesized that these processes shape memory encoding, parsing the experience by grouping self- and externally generated stimuli into differentiated events.

Neural signatures of memory gain through active exploration in an oculomotor-auditory learning task.

Active engagement improves learning and memory, and self- versus externally generated stimuli are processed differently: perceptual intensity and neural responses are attenuated. Whether the attenuation is linked to memory formation remains unclear. This study investigates whether active oculomotor control over auditory stimuli-controlling for movement and stimulus predictability-benefits associative learning, and studies the underlying neural mechanisms.

Actions do not clearly impact auditory memory.

When memorizing a list of words, those that are read aloud are remembered better than those read silently, a phenomenon known as the production effect. There have been several attempts to understand the production effect, however, actions alone have not been examined as possible contributors. Stimuli that coincide with our own actions are processed differently compared to stimuli presented passively to us.

Sensory suppression and increased neuromodulation during actions disrupt memory encoding of unpredictable self-initiated stimuli.

Actions modulate sensory processing by attenuating responses to self- compared to externally generated inputs, which is traditionally attributed to stimulus-specific motor predictions. Yet, suppression has been also found for stimuli merely coinciding with actions, pointing to unspecific processes that may be driven by neuromodulatory systems. Meanwhile, the differential processing for self-generated stimuli raises the possibility of producing effects also on memory for these stimuli; however, evidence remains mixed as to the direction of the effects.

Standard Tone Stability as a Manipulation of Precision in the Oddball Paradigm: Modulation of Prediction Error Responses to Fixed-Probability Deviants.

Electrophysiological sensory deviance detection signals, such as the mismatch negativity (MMN), have been interpreted from the predictive coding framework as manifestations of prediction error (PE). From a frequentist perspective of the classic oddball paradigm, deviant stimuli are unexpected because of their low probability. However, the amount of PE elicited by a stimulus can be dissociated from its probability of occurrence: when the observer cannot make confident predictions, any event holds little surprise value, no matter how improbable.

Self-generation and sound intensity interactively modulate perceptual bias, but not perceptual sensitivity.

The ability to distinguish self-generated stimuli from those caused by external sources is critical for all behaving organisms. Although many studies point to a sensory attenuation of self-generated stimuli, recent evidence suggests that motor actions can result in either attenuated or enhanced perceptual processing depending on the environmental context (i.e.

Attentional gain is modulated by probabilistic feature expectations in a spatial cueing task: ERP evidence.

Several theoretical and empirical studies suggest that attention and perceptual expectations influence perception in an interactive manner, whereby attentional gain is enhanced for predicted stimuli. The current study assessed whether attention and perceptual expectations interface when they are fully orthogonal, i.e.

Interrelation of attention and prediction in visual processing: Effects of task-relevance and stimulus probability.

The potentially interactive influence of attention and prediction was investigated by measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) in a spatial cueing task with attention (task-relevant) and prediction (probabilistic) cues. We identified distinct processing stages of this interactive influence. Firstly, in line with the attentional gain hypothesis, a larger amplitude response of the contralateral N1, and Nd1 for attended gratings was observed.

COMT and DRD2/ANKK-1 gene-gene interaction account for resetting of gamma neural oscillations to auditory stimulus-driven attention.

Attention capture by potentially relevant environmental stimuli is critical for human survival, yet it varies considerably among individuals. A large series of studies has suggested that attention capture may depend on the cognitive balance between maintenance and manipulation of mental representations and the flexible switch between goal-directed representations and potentially relevant stimuli outside the focus of attention; a balance that seems modulated by a prefrontostriatal dopamine pathway. Here, we examined inter-individual differences in the cognitive control of attention through studying the effects of two single nucleotide polymorphisms regulating dopamine at the prefrontal cortex and the striatum (i.

Sensory suppression of brain responses to self-generated sounds is observed with and without the perception of agency.

Stimuli caused by our own movements are given special treatment in the brain. Self-generated sounds evoke a smaller brain response than externally generated ones. This attenuated response may reflect a predictive mechanism to differentiate the sensory consequences of one's own actions from other sensory input.

Bridging prediction and attention in current research on perception and action.

Prediction and attention are fundamental brain functions in the service of perception and action. Theories on prediction relate to neural (mental) models inferring about (present or future) sensory or action-related information, whereas theories of attention are about the control of information flow underlying perception and action. Both concepts are related and not always clearly distinguishable.

Attention and prediction in human audition: a lesson from cognitive psychophysiology.

Attention is a hypothetical mechanism in the service of perception that facilitates the processing of relevant information and inhibits the processing of irrelevant information. Prediction is a hypothetical mechanism in the service of perception that considers prior information when interpreting the sensorial input. Although both (attention and prediction) aid perception, they are rarely considered together.

Motor intention determines sensory attenuation of brain responses to self-initiated sounds.

One of the functions of the brain is to predict sensory consequences of our own actions. In auditory processing, self-initiated sounds evoke a smaller brain response than passive sound exposure of the same sound sequence. Previous work suggests that this response attenuation reflects a predictive mechanism to differentiate the sensory consequences of one's own actions from other sensory input, which seems to form the basis for the sense of agency (recognizing oneself as the agent of the movement).

Sensation of agency and perception of temporal order.

After adaptation to a fixed temporal delay between actions and their sensory consequences, stimuli delivered during the delay are perceived to occur prior to actions. Temporal judgments are also influenced by the sensation of agency (experience of causing our own actions and their sensory consequences). Sensory consequences of voluntary actions are perceived to occur earlier in time than those of involuntary actions.

Cortical brain states and corticospinal synchronization influence TMS-evoked motor potentials.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) influences cortical processes. Recent findings indicate, however, that, in turn, the efficacy of TMS depends on the state of ongoing cortical oscillations. Whereas power and phase of electromyographic (EMG) activity recorded from the hand muscles as well as neural synchrony between cortex and hand muscles are known to influence the effect of TMS, to date, no study has shown an influence of the phase of cortical oscillations during wakefulness.

I know what is missing here: electrophysiological prediction error signals elicited by omissions of predicted "what" but not "when".

In the present study we investigated the neural code of sensory predictions. Grounded on a variety of empirical findings, we set out from the proposal that sensory predictions are coded via the top-down modulation of the sensory units whose response properties match the specific characteristics of the predicted stimulus (Albright, 2012; Arnal and Giraud, 2012). From this proposal, we derive the hypothesis that when the specific physical characteristics of the predicted stimulus cannot be advanced, the sensory system should not be able to formulate such predictions, as it would lack the means to represent them.

Hearing silences: human auditory processing relies on preactivation of sound-specific brain activity patterns.

The remarkable capabilities displayed by humans in making sense of an overwhelming amount of sensory information cannot be explained easily if perception is viewed as a passive process. Current theoretical and computational models assume that to achieve meaningful and coherent perception, the human brain must anticipate upcoming stimulation. But how are upcoming stimuli predicted in the brain? We unmasked the neural representation of a prediction by omitting the predicted sensory input.

Sensory suppression effects to self-initiated sounds reflect the attenuation of the unspecific N1 component of the auditory ERP.

The suppression of the auditory N1 event-related potential (ERP) to self-initiated sounds became a popular tool to tap into sensory-specific forward modeling. It is assumed that processing in the auditory cortex is attenuated due to a match between sensory stimulation and a specific sensory prediction afforded by a forward model of the motor command. The present study shows that N1 suppression was dramatically increased with long (≈ 3 s) stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA), whereas P2 suppression was equal in all SOA conditions (0.

The N1-suppression effect for self-initiated sounds is independent of attention.

Background: If we initiate a sound by our own motor behavior, the N1 component of the auditory event-related brain potential (ERP) that the sound elicits is attenuated compared to the N1 elicited by the same sound when it is initiated externally. It has been suggested that this N1 suppression results from an internal predictive mechanism that is in the service of discriminating the sensory consequences of one's own actions from other sensory input. As the N1-suppression effect is becoming a popular approach to investigate predictive processing in cognitive and social neuroscience, it is important to exclude an alternative interpretation not related to prediction.

Early electrophysiological indicators for predictive processing in audition: a review.

The auditory system essentially deals with sequential type of input and thus requires processing that is particularly suited to extract stimulus relations within a sequence. Evidence from a variety of paradigms converges to show that the auditory system automatically uses stimulus predictability for facilitating its sequential processing. This type of predictive processing does not require attentional processing of the sounds or cognitive control of the predictions, nor does it involve the preparation of motor responses to the auditory stimuli.

On the functional significance of Novelty-P3: facilitation by unexpected novel sounds.

The unexpected occurrence of a change in the auditory context has been shown to result in distraction due to a momentary attention shift. These unexpected sounds elicit the Novelty-P3 (NP3) response which has been proposed as an electrophysiological index of distractibility, and used as such in the evaluation of several clinical populations. However, unexpected sounds also result in facilitation under certain conditions.

Electrophysiological and behavioral evidence of gender differences in the modulation of distraction by the emotional context.

Gender differences in brain activity while processing emotional stimuli have been demonstrated by neuroimaging and electrophysiological studies. However, the possible differential effects of emotion on attentional mechanisms between women and men are less understood. The present study aims to elucidate any gender differences in the modulation of unexpected auditory stimulus processing using an emotional context elicited by aversive images.

When loading working memory reduces distraction: behavioral and electrophysiological evidence from an auditory-visual distraction paradigm.

The sensitivity of involuntary attention to top-down modulation was tested using an auditory-visual distraction task and a working memory (WM) load manipulation in subjects performing a simple visual classification task while ignoring contingent auditory stimulation. The sounds were repetitive standard tones (80%) and environmental novel sounds (20%). Distraction caused by the novel sounds was compared across a 1-back WM condition and a no-memory control condition, both involving the comparison of two digits.