PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Peter Kok
AU  - Pim Mostert
AU  - Floris P. de Lange
TI  - Prior expectations induce pre-stimulus sensory templates
AID  - 10.1101/119073
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 119073
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/03/21/119073.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/03/21/119073.full
AB  - Perception can be described as a process of inference, integrating bottom-up sensory inputs and top-down expectations. However, it is unclear how this process is neurally implemented. It has been proposed that expectations lead to pre-stimulus baseline increases in sensory neurons tuned to the expected stimulus, which in turn affects the processing of subsequent stimuli. Recent fMRI studies have revealed stimulus-specific patterns of activation in sensory cortex as a result of expectation, but this method lacks the temporal resolution necessary to distinguish pre- from post-stimulus processes. Here, we combined human MEG with multivariate decoding techniques to probe the representational content of neural signals in a time-resolved manner. We observed a representation of expected stimuli in the neural signal well before they were presented, demonstrating that expectations indeed induce a preactivation of stimulus templates. These results suggest a mechanism for how predictive perception can be neurally implemented.