Context dependency of time-based event-related expectations for different modalities

Abstract

Expectations about the temporal occurrence of events (when) are often tied with the expectations about certain event-related properties (what and where) happening at these time points. For instance, slowly waking up in the morning we expect our alarm clock to go off; however, the longer we do not hear it the more likely we already missed it. However, most current evidence for complex time-based event-related expectations (TBEEs) is based on the visual modality. Here we tested whether implicit TBEEs can act cross-modally. To this end, visual and auditory stimulus streams were presented which contained early and late targets embedded among distractors (to maximise temporal target uncertainty). Foreperiod-modality-contingencies were manipulated run-wise: visual targets either occurred early in 80% of trials and auditory targets occurred late in 80% of trials or vice versa. Participants showed increased sensitivity for expected auditory early/visual late targets which increased over time while the opposite pattern was observed for visual early/auditory late targets. A benefit in reaction times was only found for auditory early trials. Together, this pattern of results suggests that implicit context-dependent TBEEs for auditory targets after short foreperiods (be they correct or not) dominated and determined which modality became more expected at the late position irrespective of the veridical statistical regularity. Hence, TBEEs in cross-modal and uncertain environments are context-dependent, shaped by the dominant modality in temporal tasks (i.e., auditory) and only boost performance cross-modally when expectations about the event after the short foreperiod match with the run-wise context (i.e., auditory early/visual late).

Cross-modal perceptual enhancement of unisensory targets is uni-directional and does not affect temporal expectations

“…The results are mainly in line with our previous research showing that the learning of temporal regularities can be context-dependent and occurs with a higher likelihood for multisensory than unisensory targets (Ball et al, 2020;Ball, Andreca, et al, 2021;Ball, Fuehrmann, et al, 2018;Ball, Michels, et al, 2018;Ball, Spuerck, et al, 2021). Given the absence of TE effects in the unisensory conditions, we also replicated our findings that there seems to be an interactive effect of TEs and multisensory interactions, at least when induced by redundant targets.…”

Temporal attention

“…Apart from methodological differences, one potential reason for these discrepant results could be that the visual and auditory modality are differentially sensitive to temporal attention effects (see also Ball et al, 2022). This view is consistent with the general idea that the auditory modality may be more sensitive to temporal information (e.g., Repp and Penel, 2002;Bratzke et al, 2012), whereas the visual modality may be more sensitive to spatial information (e.g., Bertelson and Aschersleben, 1998;Park et al, 2003).…”

“…Finally, although not in the focus of the present overview, there are paradigms in which temporal information is not provided in isolation but is correlated with stimulus-specific information. This specific temporal expectancy (Thomaschke and Dreisbach, 2013), also referred to as time-based event-related expectation (e.g., Ball et al, 2022) is typically studied using a variant of the variable foreperiod paradigm. In this variant, each foreperiod is correlated with a specific type of stimulus (or response) so that the foreperiod predicts not only the temporal onset of a stimulus but also what kind of stimulus will be presented or which response it will require (e.g., Wagener and Hoffmann, 2010;Thomaschke and Dreisbach, 2015;Thomaschke et al, 2018;Ball et al, 2022).…”

“…This specific temporal expectancy (Thomaschke and Dreisbach, 2013), also referred to as time-based event-related expectation (e.g., Ball et al, 2022) is typically studied using a variant of the variable foreperiod paradigm. In this variant, each foreperiod is correlated with a specific type of stimulus (or response) so that the foreperiod predicts not only the temporal onset of a stimulus but also what kind of stimulus will be presented or which response it will require (e.g., Wagener and Hoffmann, 2010;Thomaschke and Dreisbach, 2015;Thomaschke et al, 2018;Ball et al, 2022). The typical result is that performance is better for frequent time-stimulus combinations than for infrequent ones (for an overview see Thomaschke and Dreisbach, 2015).…”

Neural networks representing temporal expectation in mice

“…Tang et al, 2016), and hasten learning (Jin et al, 2020; Jones et al, 2022). It is well established that humans are able to extract regularities in the temporal structure of sensory stimuli (Ball et al, 2022; Ball, Michels, et al, 2018; Nobre & van Ede, 2018), which requires time-keeping mechanisms in the brain (Finnerty et al, 2015). However, how experience encodes temporal expectations across functional neural circuits remains difficult to examine on the circuit-level in humans.…”