We have come to recognize the brain as a predictive organ, anticipating attributes of the incoming sensory stimulation to guide perception and action in the service of adaptive behaviour. In the quest to understand the neural bases of the modulatory prospective signals that prioritize and select relevant events during perception, one fundamental dimension has until recently been largely overlooked: time. In this Review, we introduce the burgeoning field of temporal attention and illustrate how the brain makes use of various forms of temporal regularities in the environment to guide adaptive behaviour and influence neural processing.

Repetition suppression, the phenomenon that the second presentation of a stimulus attenuates neural activity, is typically viewed as an automatic consequence of repeated stimulus presentation. However, a recent neuroimaging study has suggested that repetition suppression may be driven by top-down expectations. Here we examined whether and when repetition suppression can be modulated by top-down expectation. Participants listened to auditory stimuli in blocks where tone repetitions were either expected or unexpected, while we recorded ongoing neural activity using magnetoencephalography. We found robust repetition suppression in the auditory cortex for repeated tones. Interestingly, this reduction was significantly larger for expected than unexpected repetitions, both in terms of evoked activity and gamma-band synchrony. These findings indicate a role of top-down expectation in generating repetition suppression and are in line with predictive coding models of perception, in which the difference between expected and actual input is propagated from lower to higher cortical areas.

Our perception is facilitated if we know where and when a sensory stimulus will occur. This phenomenon is accounted for by spatial and temporal orienting of attention. Whereas spatial orienting of attention has repeatedly been shown to involve spatially specific modulations of ongoing oscillations within sensory cortex, it is not clear to what extent anticipatory modulations of ongoing oscillations are involved in temporal orienting of attention. To address this, we recorded magnetoencephalography while human participants performed a tactile discrimination task. We cued participants to the left or the right hand, after which a tactile stimulus was presented at one of several fixed temporal delays. We thus assessed whether and how ongoing sensorimotor oscillations are modulated during tactile anticipation. We provide evidence for three phenomena. First, orienting to an upcoming tactile event involves a spatially specific contralateral suppression of alpha-and beta-band oscillations within sensorimotor cortex. Second, this modulation is deployed with temporal specificity, and this is more pronounced for beta-band compared with alpha-band oscillations. Third, the contralateral suppression of beta-band oscillations is associated with faster responses to subsequently presented tactile stimuli. Control measures showed that these results cannot be explained by motor planning or execution. We conclude that the modulation of ongoing oscillations within sensory cortex reflects a unifying mechanism underlying both spatial and temporal orienting of attention.

Brain areas that control gaze are also recruited for covert shifts of spatial attention 1 – 9 . In the external space of perception, there is a natural, ecological link between the control of gaze and of spatial attention, since information sampled at covertly attended locations can inform where to look next 2 , 10 , 11 . Attention can also be directed internally to representations held within the spatial layout of visual working memory 12 – 16 . In such cases, the incentive for using attention to direct gaze disappears since there are no external targets to scan. Here we investigate whether the brain’s oculomotor system also participates in attention within the internal space of memory. Paradoxically, we reveal this participation through gaze behaviour itself. We demonstrate that selecting an item from visual working memory biases gaze in the direction of the memorised location of that item – despite there being nothing to look at and even though location memory was never explicitly probed. This retrospective ‘gaze bias’ occurs only when an item is not already in the internal focus of attention, and predicts the performance benefit associated with the focusing of internal attention. We conclude that the oculomotor system also participates in the focusing of attention within memorised space, leaving traces all the way to the eyes.