Brief Communication abstract


Nature Neuroscience 11, 1004 - 1006 (2008)
Published online: 1 August 2008 | doi:10.1038/nn.2163

Neural repetition suppression reflects fulfilled perceptual expectations

Christopher Summerfield1,2, Emily H Trittschuh3, Jim M Monti3, M-Marsel Mesulam3 & Tobias Egner3

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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.

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  1. INSERM U742, Université Pierre et Marie Currie, 9 Quai St. Bernard, 75005 Paris, France.
  2. Département d'Études Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 29 Rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France.
  3. Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, 320 East Superior Street, Searle 11, Chicago, Illinois 60611, USA.

Correspondence to: Tobias Egner3 e-mail: t-egner@northwestern.edu.




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