EditorialBridging prediction and attention in current research on perception and action
Section snippets
1. Introduction
Predictive and attentive processing serves to optimize perception and action. The respective theoretical constructs, prediction and attention, have a long tradition in neuroscience. The physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz emphasized the importance of unconscious inferences on information processing already in the 19th century (von Helmholtz, 1867) and the psychologist William James elaborated on the beneficial role of attention (James, 1890). Although attention and prediction lack an unambiguous
2. Prediction
The term prediction has been “en vogue” for a number of years now, but reference to analogous concepts has had a long tradition in cognitive psychology, psychophysiology, and the neurosciences. Diverse fields of study have alluded to predictive processing mechanisms to explain different phenomena and yet others that have not traditionally been viewed from the prism of prediction, are now being reinterpreted from this viewpoint. One example, in which prediction-related concepts have been
3. Attention
Attention enables to select relevant rather than irrelevant information. Relevance is defined by the current goals of an organism, which can be set intentionally (e.g. via instruction) and involuntarily (e.g. via the context or hidden motives). In other words, attention exerts a top–down effect on information processing. The attention-focused papers in this special issue considered different flavors of such top–down influence: voluntary and involuntary attention (Alho et al.; Hisagi et al.,),
4. Interactions between attention and prediction
Prediction and attention both enable or aid perception and action. While some of the contributions in this special issue shortly described above, were devoted to either prediction or attention, others already revealed a close link between the two concepts. In fact, several contributions to this special issue explicitly addressed a potential interaction of prediction and attention, which has not been sufficiently addressed so far. In principle, many attentional phenomena can be integrated into a
5. Conclusions
The goal of this special issue was to discuss the sometimes diverse and contradictory concepts of prediction and attention in perception and action. For example, what has been called attention in older attentional cuing studies is nowadays often called prediction, and attention is more confined to settings where particular stimulus features are defined as task relevant, that is, attended to (in contrast to task-irrelevant, i.e. unattended, stimulus features). Moreover, the large field of
Acknowledgments
This work was funded by a Reinhart-Koselleck grant of the German Research Foundation SCHR 375/20 (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) to ES and by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) through Ramón y Cajal fellowship RYC-2013-12577 to ISM.
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2020, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral ReviewsCitation Excerpt :A suppressed N1 amplitude in response to expected sensory feedback seems to mirror reduced reactivity of the auditory cortex to feedback during speaking as observed in fMRI studies (e.g., Christoffels et al., 2007). It seems plausible that the rapid transmission of information via cerebellar-thalamic connections to temporal lobe regions contributes to the sensory suppression effects observed in auditory ERP responses (Knolle et al., 2013, 2012; Schwartze et al., 2012). Specifically, cerebellar-thalamo-cortical connections may contribute to N1 generation by modulating its unspecific subcomponent (Schwartze et al., 2012).
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2019, NeuropsychologiaCitation Excerpt :Life in a complex sensory world requires rapid distinctions between sensory input produced by one's own actions and input resulting from the actions of others. To facilitate this process, an internal forward model is thought to guide perception on the basis of predictions about the sensory feedback to self-action (Friston, 2005; Schroger et al., 2015). An efference copy (Holst and Mittelstaedt, 1950; von Holst, 1954; see also Sommer and Wurtz, 2008 for a review) of the motor command is sent from the motor cortex to relevant sensory regions via the cerebellum, supporting the computation of the predicted sensory feedback to self-action (Knolle et al., 2013a, 2012; Wolpert and Flanagan, 2001).