Back

Expectation Consecutively boosts Neural Processing of Expected and Unexpected Visual Information

Alink, A.; Becker, J.; Blank, H.

2026-03-25 neuroscience
10.64898/2026.03.23.713176 bioRxiv
Show abstract

This electroencephalography (EEG) study elucidates how expectations shape visually evoked brain responses over time by revealing a biphasic temporal mechanism: an initial enhancement of encoding for expected image components, followed by a later prioritization of unexpected components. This temporal dissociation suggests that the brain first combines sensory input with prior expectations in a Bayesian manner before shifting to emphasize surprising information, supporting both efficient recognition and adaptive model updating.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.