Provided that match and mismatch of stimulus and prediction evoke distinct neural responses [5], an early difference between ERPs for predictable and unpredictable words represents an upper bound for the latency of top-down and bottom-up interactions.
Although stimuli were moving in both conditions, the constant-context condition might be predisposed to evoke more motion-based predictions than the random-context condition, since the known onset positions allow, for instance, direction of attention to future stimulus positions (Krauzlis & Nummela, 2011).
Additional tools, such as EEG and evoked potentials, improve prediction of outcome in this setting, but are not widely available and require significant implementation.
Trials where the shocks are assigned to the other rather than oneself could be treated as safety signals, evoking a dopaminergic prediction error that is enhanced by levodopa.
This fits well with contemporary proposals that highlight the anticipatory nature of the brain and the default network's role in this capacity by which associations, analogies and predictions are automatically evoked about what is likely to be relevant in a given situation when faced with novel input [44], [45].
Compatible with these notions, dopamine neurons show phasic responses to higher order prediction errors evoked by conditioned, reward predicting stimuli [ 1].
This finding is consistent with our prediction that distractors will evoke a smaller increase in activation in the frontostriatal circuits at high relative to low load.
It has been found in thousands of studies that incoming sounds that violate an established regularity evoke mismatch responses that can be interpreted as prediction error signals occurring at different levels along the hierarchy of predictive models.
Our prediction was that the first condition would evoke pronounced mislocalizations, while the second condition would not (or would evoke less pronounced mislocalizations, at least).
