The temporal and spectral characteristics of expectations and prediction errors in pain and thermoception
- University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany
Abstract
In the context of a generative model, such as predictive coding, pain and heat perception can be construed as the integration of expectation and input with their difference denoted as a prediction error. In a previous neuroimaging study (Geuter et al., 2017) we observed an important role of the insula in such a model, but could not establish its temporal aspects. Here we employed electroencephalography to investigate neural representations of predictions and prediction errors in heat and pain processing. Our data show that alpha-to-beta activity was associated with stimulus intensity expectation, followed by a negative modulation of gamma band activity by absolute prediction errors. This is in contrast to prediction errors in visual and auditory perception, which are associated with increased gamma band activity, but is in agreement with observations in working memory and word matching, which show gamma band activity for correct, rather than violated predictions.
Data availability
Data for this study are available on https://osf.io/f2mua/
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The temporal and spectral characteristics of expectations and prediction errors in pain and thermoceptionOpen Science Framework, F2MUA.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SFB 289)
- Christian Büchel
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SFB TR 169 project B3)
- Michael Rose
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: All volunteers gave their informed consent. The study was approved by the Ethics board of the Hamburg Medical Association (PV4745).
Copyright
© 2021, Strube et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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The temporal and spectral characteristics of expectations and prediction errors in pain and thermoception
eLife 10:e62809.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.62809
Further reading
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- Neuroscience
When holding visual information temporarily in working memory (WM), the neural representation of the memorandum is distributed across various cortical regions, including visual and frontal cortices. However, the role of stimulus representation in visual and frontal cortices during WM has been controversial. Here, we tested the hypothesis that stimulus representation persists in the frontal cortex to facilitate flexible control demands in WM. During functional MRI, participants flexibly switched between simple WM maintenance of visual stimulus or more complex rule-based categorization of maintained stimulus on a trial-by-trial basis. Our results demonstrated enhanced stimulus representation in the frontal cortex that tracked demands for active WM control and enhanced stimulus representation in the visual cortex that tracked demands for precise WM maintenance. This differential frontal stimulus representation traded off with the newly-generated category representation with varying control demands. Simulation using multi-module recurrent neural networks replicated human neural patterns when stimulus information was preserved for network readout. Altogether, these findings help reconcile the long-standing debate in WM research, and provide empirical and computational evidence that flexible stimulus representation in the frontal cortex during WM serves as a potential neural coding scheme to accommodate the ever-changing environment.
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- Neuroscience
When navigating environments with changing rules, human brain circuits flexibly adapt how and where we retain information to help us achieve our immediate goals.
