Elsevier

Brain Research

Volume 1626, 11 November 2015, Pages 1-13
Brain Research

Editorial
Bridging prediction and attention in current research on perception and action

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2015.08.037Get rights and content

Abstract

Prediction and attention are fundamental brain functions in the service of perception and action. Theories on prediction relate to neural (mental) models inferring about (present or future) sensory or action-related information, whereas theories of attention are about the control of information flow underlying perception and action. Both concepts are related and not always clearly distinguishable. The special issue includes current research on prediction and attention in various subfields of perception and action. It especially considers interactions between predictive and attentive processes, which constitute a newly emerging and highly interesting field of research. As outlined in this editorial, the contributions in this special issue allow specifying as well as bridging concepts on prediction and attention. The joint consideration of prediction and attention also reveals common functional principles of 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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