Lexical Processing Strongly Affects Reading Times But Not Skipping During Natural Reading.

In a typical text, readers look much longer at some words than at others, even skipping many altogether. Historically, researchers explained this variation via low-level visual or oculomotor factors, but today it is primarily explained via factors determining a word's lexical processing ease, such as how well word identity can be predicted from context or discerned from parafoveal preview. While the existence of these effects is well established in controlled experiments, the relative importance of prediction, preview and low-level factors in natural reading remains unclear.

Cortical activity during naturalistic music listening reflects short-range predictions based on long-term experience.

Expectations shape our experience of music. However, the internal model upon which listeners form melodic expectations is still debated. Do expectations stem from Gestalt-like principles or statistical learning? If the latter, does long-term experience play an important role, or are short-term regularities sufficient? And finally, what length of context informs contextual expectations? To answer these questions, we presented human listeners with diverse naturalistic compositions from Western classical music, while recording neural activity using MEG.

Reconstructing the predictive architecture of the mind and brain.

Predictive processing has become an influential framework in cognitive neuroscience. However, it often lacks specificity and direct empirical support. How can we probe the nature and limits of the predictive brain? We highlight the potential of recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) for providing a richer and more computationally explicit test of this theory of cortical function.

Dampened sensory representations for expected input across the ventral visual stream.

Expectations, derived from previous experience, can help in making perception faster, more reliable and informative. A key neural signature of perceptual expectations is expectation suppression, an attenuated neural response to expected compared with unexpected stimuli. While expectation suppression has been reported using a variety of paradigms and recording methods, it remains unclear what neural modulation underlies this response attenuation.

A hierarchy of linguistic predictions during natural language comprehension.

Understanding spoken language requires transforming ambiguous acoustic streams into a hierarchy of representations, from phonemes to meaning. It has been suggested that the brain uses prediction to guide the interpretation of incoming input. However, the role of prediction in language processing remains disputed, with disagreement about both the ubiquity and representational nature of predictions.

Word contexts enhance the neural representation of individual letters in early visual cortex.

Visual context facilitates perception, but how this is neurally implemented remains unclear. One example of contextual facilitation is found in reading, where letters are more easily identified when embedded in a word. Bottom-up models explain this word advantage as a post-perceptual decision bias, while top-down models propose that word contexts enhance perception itself.

Confidence resets reveal hierarchical adaptive learning in humans.

Hierarchical processing is pervasive in the brain, but its computational significance for learning under uncertainty is disputed. On the one hand, hierarchical models provide an optimal framework and are becoming increasingly popular to study cognition. On the other hand, non-hierarchical (flat) models remain influential and can learn efficiently, even in uncertain and changing environments.

How Do Expectations Shape Perception?

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.

Attention-based perceptual learning does not affect access to awareness.

Visual information that is relevant for an observer gains prioritized access to awareness (Gayet, Van der Stigchel, & Paffen, 2014). Here we investigate whether information that was relevant for an extended duration is prioritized for access to awareness when it is no longer relevant. We applied a perceptual-learning paradigm, in which observers were trained for 3 days on a speed-discrimination task.

Great Expectations: Is there Evidence for Predictive Coding in Auditory Cortex?

Predictive coding is possibly one of the most influential, comprehensive, and controversial theories of neural function. While proponents praise its explanatory potential, critics object that key tenets of the theory are untested or even untestable. The present article critically examines existing evidence for predictive coding in the auditory modality.

Visual input that matches the content of visual working memory requires less (not faster) evidence sampling to reach conscious access.

The content of visual working memory (VWM) affects the processing of concurrent visual input. Recently, it has been demonstrated that stimuli are released from interocular suppression faster when they match rather than mismatch a color that is memorized for subsequent recall. In order to investigate the nature of the interaction between visual representations elicited by VWM and visual representations elicited by retinal input, we modeled the perceptual processes leading up to this difference in suppression durations.