Traveling waves shape neural population dynamics enabling predictions and internal model updating
Year: 2024
Type: preprint
Abstract: The brain generates predictions based on statistical regularities in our environment. However, it is unclear how predictions are optimized through iterative interactions with the environment. Because traveling waves (TWs) propagate across the cortex shaping neural excitability, they can carry information to serve predictive processing. Using human intracranial recordings, we show that anterior-to-posterior alpha TWs correlated with prediction strength. Learning about priors altered neural state space trajectories, and how much it altered correlated with trial-by-trial prediction strength. Learning involved mismatches between predictions and sensory evidence triggering alpha-phase resets in lateral temporal cortex, accompanied by stronger alpha phase-high gamma amplitude coupling and high-gamma power. The mismatch initiated posterior-to-anterior alpha TWs and change in the subsequent trial's state space trajectory, facilitating model updating. Our findings suggest a vital role of alpha TWs carrying both predictions to sensory cortex and mismatch signals to frontal cortex for trial-by-trial fine-tuning of predictive models.
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: Receptors, microcircuits and hierarchical connectivity in predictive coding and sensory awareness, Wisconsin National Primate Research Center Support, electroencephalography and single-unit recordings, Human Auditory Cortex Physiology, Mechanisms of Loss, Recovery and Disorders of Consciousness
OpenAlex ID: W4390707293