Neural integration of stimulus history underlies prediction for naturalistically evolving sequences

Abstract

Forming valid predictions about the environment is crucial to survival. However, whether humans are able to form valid predictions about natural stimuli based on their temporal statistical regularities remains unknown. Here, we presented subjects with tone sequences with pitch fluctuations that, over time, capture long-range temporal dependence structures prevalent in natural stimuli. We found that subjects were able to exploit such naturalistic statistical regularities to make valid predictions about upcoming items in a sequence. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings revealed that slow, arrhythmic cortical dynamics tracked the evolving pitch sequence over time such that neural activity at a given moment was influenced by the pitch of up to seven previous tones. Importantly, such history integration contained in neural activity predicted the expected pitch of the upcoming tone, providing a concrete computational mechanism for prediction. These results establish humans’ ability to make valid predictions based on temporal regularities inherent in naturalistic stimuli and further reveal the neural mechanisms underlying such predictive computation.