To respond to the demands of an ever-changing world, people need to be able to anticipate what is going to happen. However, is this preparation always the same, regardless of the context? Members of the Human Neuroscience Laboratory (https://wpd.ugr.es/~humneuro/ ) at CIMCYC, in collaboration with the DasCi institute (http://sipba.ugr.es/), try to answer this question in a research article recently published in the journal NeuroImage (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2023.119960).
This research compared two phenomena that often appear in the literature as interchangeable elements: Selective Attention and Perceptual Expectancy. We can understand Attention as the selection of task-relevant stimuli, while Expectancy refers to the anticipation of probable information. In different blocks, the experimental task required selecting (attention) or expecting with probability (expectancy) the appearance of faces or names of people. Brain activity was recorded by electroencephalography (EEG), and multivariate analyses were used to study the patterns of representation of the anticipated stimuli. The study shows how, as we prepare (i.e., as we anticipate the stimuli to which we will need to respond), a number of phenomena occur, ranging from encoding the physical form of the stimuli to anticipating the expected information. Fundamentally, at all times it is possible to distinguish between the activity patterns of the two types of context. These differences could be associated with the fact that when we attend, preparation seems to use strategies more similar to the direct perception of stimuli.
In conclusion, the results show how preparation is a complex phenomenon, which is highly dependent on the functional utility of the anticipated information .
Contact:
Chema Peñalver: cgpenalver@ugr.es
Carlos González García: cgonzalez@ugr.es
María Ruz: mruz@ugr.es
Complete reference: Peñalver, J. M. G., López-García, D., González-García, C., Aguado-López, B., Górriz, J. M., & Ruz, M. (2023). Top-down specific preparatory activations for Selective Attention and Perceptual Expectations. NeuroImage, 119960. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2023.119960