Do we always prepare in the same way?
Today is a happy day!🥳 Our work (the first paper of Chema’s PhD!!) comparing top-down anticipatory representations in selective Attention and Expectation finally sees the light!
Being able to anticipate complex environmental information is crucial to achieve efficient behavior. But do we always prepare in the same way? 🧠🔮 To answer that, we compared two (apparently) similar cognitive mechanisms: Selective Attention and Perceptual Expectations.
Selective Attention: is the stimulus relevant to my goals? Perceptual Expectation: is the stimulus likely to appear?
We employed a cue-target task while recording EEG from healthy participants. In different blocks, participants had to select or expect faces or names.
With Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) we found that preparation is a complex phenomenon in which a cascade of events unfolds: from bottom-up cue coding, to top-down anticipated stimulus representation.
Using MVPA, we found similar category (faces vs names) anticipation in both contexts. However, a classifier trained in one context was unable to generalize to the other! This, together with RSA suggests that anticipating relevant vs probable information is context-specific.
All of this leads us to conclude that although humans are able to prepare efficiently for upcoming stimuli, they do so differently depending on their informational role. There are still lots of questions to answer, so stay tuned for more soon! 👀🔍
Data and code availability