Humans live in a volatile environment, subject to changes occurring at different timescales. The ability to adjust internal predictions accordingly is critical for perception and action. We studied this ability with two EEG experiments in which participants were presented with sequences of four Gabor patches, simulating a rotation, and instructed to respond to the last stimulus (target) to indicate whether or not it continued the direction of the first three stimuli. Each experiment included a short-term learning phase in which the probabilities of these two options were very different (p = .2 vs. p = .8, Rules A and B, respectively), followed by a neutral test phase in which both probabilities were equal. In addition, in one of the experiments, prior to the short-term phase, participants performed a much longer long-term learning phase where the relative probabilities of the rules predicting targets were opposite to those of the short-term phase. Analyses of the RTs and P3 amplitudes showed that, in the neutral test phase, participants initially predicted targets according to the probabilities learned in the short-term phase. However, whereas participants not pre-exposed to the long-term learning phase gradually adjusted their predictions to the neutral probabilities, for those who performed the long-term phase, the short-term associations were spontaneously replaced by those learned in that phase. This indicates that the long-term associations remained intact whereas the short-term associations were learned, transiently used, and abandoned when the context changed. The spontaneous recovery suggests independent storage and control of long-term and short-term associations.

中文翻译：

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视觉预测在不同的时间尺度上运行。

人类生活在一个多变的环境中，会在不同的时间尺度上发生变化。相应地调整内部预测的能力对于感知和行动至关重要。我们通过两个 EEG 实验研究了这种能力，其中向参与者展示了四个 Gabor 斑块的序列，模拟旋转，并指示他们对最后一个刺激（目标）做出反应，以表明它是否继续前三个刺激的方向。每个实验都包括一个短期学习阶段，其中这两个选项的概率非常不同（分别为 p = .2 与 p = .8，规则 A 和 B），然后是中性测试阶段，其中两个概率是平等的。此外，在其中一项实验中，在短期阶段之前，参与者执行了一个更长的长期学习阶段，其中规则预测目标的相对概率与短期阶段相反。对 RT 和 P3 幅度的分析表明，在中性测试阶段，参与者最初根据短期阶段学到的概率预测目标。然而，虽然没有预先接触长期学习阶段的参与者逐渐将他们的预测调整到中性概率，但对于那些执行长期学习阶段的人来说，短期关联会自发地被在该阶段学习的那些人所取代。这表明长期关联保持不变，而短期关联被学习、暂时使用并在上下文改变时被放弃。