Anticipation of temporally structured events in the brain

Caroline Lee, Mariam Aly, Christopher Baldassano

Abstract:

Learning about temporal structure is adaptive because it enables the generation of
expectations. We examined how the brain uses experience in structured environments to anticipate
upcoming events. During fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), individuals watched a 90 s
movie clip six times. Using a hidden Markov model applied to searchlights across the whole brain,
we identified temporal shifts between activity patterns evoked by the first vs. repeated viewings of
the movie clip. In many regions throughout the cortex, neural activity patterns for repeated
viewings shifted to precede those of initial viewing by up to 15 s. This anticipation varied
hierarchically in a posterior (less anticipation) to anterior (more anticipation) fashion. We also
identified specific regions in which the timing of the brain’s event boundaries was related to those
of human-labeled event boundaries, with the timing of this relationship shifting on repeated
viewings. With repeated viewing, the brain’s event boundaries came to precede human-annotated
boundaries by 1–4 s on average. Together, these results demonstrate a hierarchy of anticipatory
signals in the human brain and link them to subjective experiences of events.