It is well known that expectations influence how we perceive the world. Yet the neural mechanisms underlying this process remain unclear. Studies about the effects of prior expectations have focused so far on artificial contingencies between simple neutral cues and events. Real-world expectations are however often generated from complex associations between contexts and objects learned over a lifetime. Additionally, these expectations may contain some affective value and recent proposals present conflicting hypotheses about the mechanisms underlying affect in predictions. In this study, we used fMRI to investigate how object processing is influenced by realistic context-based expectations, and how affect impacts these expectations. First, we show that the precuneus, the inferotemporal cortex and the frontal cortex are more active during object recognition when expectations have been elicited a priori, irrespectively of their validity or their affective intensity. This result supports previous hypotheses according to which these brain areas integrate contextual expectations with object sensory information. Notably, these brain areas are different from those responsible for simultaneous context-object interactions, dissociating the two processes. Then, we show that early visual areas, on the contrary, are more active during object recognition when no prior expectation has been elicited by a context. Lastly, BOLD activity was shown to be enhanced in early visual areas when objects are less expected, but only when contexts are neutral; the reverse effect is observed when contexts are affective. This result supports the proposal that affect modulates the weighting of sensory information during predictions. Together, our results help elucidate the neural mechanisms of real-world expectations.

中文翻译：

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现实世界的期望及其情感价值调节对象处理

众所周知，期望会影响我们对世界的看法。然而，这一过程背后的神经机制仍不清楚。迄今为止，关于先验预期影响的研究主要集中在简单的中性线索和事件之间的人为偶然性上。然而，现实世界的期望通常是从上下文和一生中学习的对象之间的复杂关联中产生的。此外，这些期望可能包含一些情感价值，并且最近的提案提出了关于预测中潜在影响机制的相互矛盾的假设。在这项研究中，我们使用 fMRI 来研究对象处理如何受到现实的基于上下文的期望的影响，以及影响如何影响这些期望。首先，我们证明楔前叶，当预期被先验地引出时，无论其有效性或情感强度如何，颞下皮层和额叶皮层在物体识别过程中都更加活跃。这一结果支持了先前的假设，根据这些假设，这些大脑区域将情境预期与物体感官信息相结合。值得注意的是，这些大脑区域与负责同步上下文对象交互的区域不同，将这两个过程分开。然后，我们表明，相反，当上下文没有引起先前的期望时，早期的视觉区域在物体识别过程中更加活跃。最后，当对象不太预期时，BOLD 活动在早期视觉区域中被增强，但仅当上下文是中性时；当上下文具有情感时，会观察到相反的效果。该结果支持影响在预测过程中调节感官信息权重的提议。总之，我们的结果有助于阐明现实世界期望的神经机制。