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
Sound location coding has been extensively studied at the central nucleus of the mammalian inferior colliculus (CNIC), supporting a population code. However, this population code has not been extensively characterized on the single-trial level with simultaneous recordings or at other anatomical regions like the dorsal cortex of inferior colliculus (DCIC), which is relevant for learning-induced experience dependent plasticity. To address these knowledge gaps, here we made in two complementary ways large-scale recordings of DCIC populations from awake mice in response to sounds delivered from 13 different frontal horizontal locations (azimuths): volumetric two-photon calcium imaging with ~700 cells simultaneously recorded at a relatively low temporal resolution, and high-density single-unit extracellular recordings with ~20 cells simultaneously recorded at a high temporal resolution. Independent of the method, the recorded DCIC population responses revealed substantial trial-to-trial variation (neuronal noise) which was significantly correlated across pairs of neurons (noise correlations) in the passively listening condition. Nevertheless, decoding analysis supported that these noisy response patterns encode sound location on the single-trial basis, reaching errors that match the discrimination ability of mice. The detected noise correlations contributed to minimize the error of the DCIC population code of sound azimuth. Altogether these findings point out that DCIC can encode sound location in a similar format to what has been proposed for CNIC, opening exciting questions about how noise correlations could shape this code in the context of cortico-collicular input and experience-dependent plasticity.
