Activating task relevant prior knowledge increases active information storage in content specific brain areas
2016
Predictive coding suggests that the brain infers the causes of its sensations by combining sensory evidence with internal predictions based on available prior knowledge. However, the neurophysiological correlates of (pre-)activated prior knowledge serving for predictions are still unknown. Based on the idea that such pre-activated prior-knowledge must be maintained until needed we measured the amount of maintained information in neural signals via the active information storage (AIS) measure. AIS was calculated on whole-brain beamformer-reconstructed source time-courses from magnetoencephalography recordings of 52 human subjects during the baseline of a Mooney face/house detection task. Pre-activation of prior knowledge for faces showed as alpha- and beta-band related AIS increases in content specific areas; these AIS increases were behaviourally relevant. Moreover, top-down transfer of predictions estimated by transfer entropy was associated with beta frequencies. Our results support accounts that activated prior knowledge and the corresponding predictions are signalled in low frequency activity (
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