Abstract rules drive adaptation in the subcortical sensory pathway

Abstract
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Abstract

The subcortical sensory pathways are the fundamental channels for mapping the outside world to our minds. Sensory pathways efficiently transmit information by adapting neural responses to the local statistics of the sensory input. The longstanding mechanistic explanation for this adaptive behaviour is that neural activity decreases with increasing regularities in the local statistics of the stimuli. An alternative account is that neural coding is directly driven by expectations of the sensory input. Here we used abstract rules to manipulate expectations independently of local stimulus statistics. The ultra-high-field functional-MRI data show that abstract expectations can drive the response amplitude to tones in the human auditory pathway. These results provide first unambiguous evidence of abstract processing in a subcortical sensory pathway. They indicate that the neural representation of the outside world is altered by our prior beliefs even at initial points of the processing hierarchy.

Data availability

Derivatives (beta maps and log-likelihood maps, computed with SPM) and all code used for data processing and analysis are publicly available in https://osf.io/f5tsy/.

The following data sets were generated

1. Tabas A
(2020) Predictive processing in the human subcortical auditory pathway
OSF, 10.17605/OSF.IO/F5TSY.

https://osf.io/f5tsy/

Article and author information

Author details

Alejandro Tabas

Research Group: Neural Mechanisms of Human Communication, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

For correspondence
alejandro.tabas@tu-dresden.de

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-8643-1543
Glad Mihai

Research Group: Neural Mechanisms of Human Communication, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Stefan Kiebel

Faculty of Psychology, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Robert Trampel

Research Group: Neural Mechanisms of Human Communication, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Katharina von Kriegstein

Faculty of Psychology, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-7989-5860

Funding

H2020 European Research Council (SENSOCOM (647051))

Katharina von Kriegstein

Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems Magdeburg

Alejandro Tabas

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: This study was approved by the Ethics committee of the Medical Faculty of the University of Leipzig, Germany (ethics approval number 273/14-ff). All listeners provided written informed consent and received monetary compensation for their participation.

Copyright

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.