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Statistical learning attenuates visual activity only for attended stimuli

View ORCID ProfileDavid Richter, View ORCID ProfileFloris P. de Lange
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/653782
David Richter
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, 6500 HB Nijmegen, Netherlands
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  • For correspondence: d.richter@donders.ru.nl
Floris P. de Lange
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, 6500 HB Nijmegen, Netherlands
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Abstract

Perception and behavior can be guided by predictions, which are often based on learned statistical regularities. Neural responses to expected stimuli are frequently found to be attenuated after statistical learning. However, whether this sensory attenuation following statistical learning occurs automatically or depends on attention remains unknown. In the present fMRI study, we exposed human volunteers to sequentially presented object stimuli, in which the first object predicted the identity of the second object. We observed a strong attenuation of neural activity for expected compared to unexpected stimuli in the ventral visual stream. Crucially, this sensory attenuation was only apparent when stimuli were attended, and vanished when attention was directed away from the predictable objects. These results put important constraints on neurocomputational theories that cast perception as a process of probabilistic integration of prior knowledge and sensory information.

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  • Conflict of Interest The authors declare no competing interests.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted May 31, 2019.
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Statistical learning attenuates visual activity only for attended stimuli
David Richter, Floris P. de Lange
bioRxiv 653782; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/653782
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Statistical learning attenuates visual activity only for attended stimuli
David Richter, Floris P. de Lange
bioRxiv 653782; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/653782

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