How does information from seconds earlier affect neocortical responses to new input? We found that when two groups of participants heard the same sentence in a narrative, preceded by different contexts, the neural responses of each group were initially different but gradually fell into alignment. We observed a hierarchical gradient: sensory cortices aligned most quickly, followed by mid-level regions, while some higher-order cortical regions took more than 10 seconds to align. What computations explain this hierarchical temporal organization? Linear integration models predict that regions that are slower to integrate new information should also be slower to forget old information. However, we found that higher-order regions could rapidly forget prior context. The data from the cortical hierarchy were instead captured by a model in which each region maintains a temporal context representation that is nonlinearly integrated with input at each moment, and this integration is gated by local prediction error.

中文翻译：

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构建和忘记人类大脑皮层的时间背景。


几秒钟前的信息如何影响新皮质对新输入的反应？我们发现，当两组参与者在不同的背景下听到叙述中的同一个句子时，每组的神经反应最初是不同的，但逐渐趋于一致。我们观察到了分层梯度：感觉皮层对齐速度最快，其次是中层区域，而一些高阶皮层区域需要 10 秒以上才能对齐。什么计算可以解释这种分层时间组织？线性整合模型预测，整合新信息较慢的区域忘记旧信息的速度也应该较慢。然而，我们发现高阶区域可能会很快忘记先前的上下文。相反，来自皮质层次结构的数据由模型捕获，其中每个区域维护一个时间上下文表示，该表示与每个时刻的输入非线性集成，并且这种集成由局部预测误差进行门控。