Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Research Publications

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Author: Blom, Tessel × Author: Bode, Stefan × Author: Feuerriegel, Daniel × Author: Hogendoorn, Jacob × End date: 2023 × Start date: 2020 ×

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    Position representations of moving objects align with real-time position in the early visual response
    Johnson, PA ; Blom, T ; van Gaal, S ; Feuerriegel, D ; Bode, S ; Hogendoorn, H ( 2022-06-29)
    Abstract: When localising a moving object, the brain receives outdated sensory information about its position, due to the time required for neural transmission and processing. The brain may overcome these fundamental delays through predictively encoding the position of moving objects using information from their past trajectories. In the present study, we evaluated this proposition using multivariate analysis of high temporal resolution electroencephalographic data. We tracked neural position representations of moving objects at different stages of visual processing, relative to the real-time position of the object. During early stimulus-evoked activity, position representations of moving objects were activated substantially earlier than the equivalent activity evoked by unpredictable flashes, aligning the earliest representations of moving stimuli with their real-time positions. These findings indicate that the predictability of straight trajectories enables full compensation for the neural delays accumulated early in stimulus processing, but that delays still accumulate across later stages of cortical processing.
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    Predictions drive neural representations of visual events ahead of incoming sensory information
    Blom, T ; Feuerriegel, D ; Johnson, P ; Bode, S ; Hogendoorn, H (NATL ACAD SCIENCES, 2020-03-31)
    The transmission of sensory information through the visual system takes time. As a result of these delays, the visual information available to the brain always lags behind the timing of events in the present moment. Compensating for these delays is crucial for functioning within dynamic environments, since interacting with a moving object (e.g., catching a ball) requires real-time localization of the object. One way the brain might achieve this is via prediction of anticipated events. Using time-resolved decoding of electroencephalographic (EEG) data, we demonstrate that the visual system represents the anticipated future position of a moving object, showing that predictive mechanisms activate the same neural representations as afferent sensory input. Importantly, this activation is evident before sensory input corresponding to the stimulus position is able to arrive. Finally, we demonstrate that, when predicted events do not eventuate, sensory information arrives too late to prevent the visual system from representing what was expected but never presented. Taken together, we demonstrate how the visual system can implement predictive mechanisms to preactivate sensory representations, and argue that this might allow it to compensate for its own temporal constraints, allowing us to interact with dynamic visual environments in real time.