The effect of context congruency on fMRI repetition suppression for objects

GND
1268939811
Affiliation
School of Psychology, Zhejiang Normal University, China
Li, Chenglin;
GND
1316839729
ORCID
0000-0001-5005-6430
Affiliation
Department of General Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Institute of Psychology, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Ficco, Linda;
Affiliation
Macromedia University of Applied Sciences, Munich, Germany
Trapp, Sabrina;
GND
1215789882
ORCID
0000-0003-1661-195X
Affiliation
Department of Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neurosciences, Institute of Psychology, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Rostalski, Sophie-Marie;
GND
1325521574
ORCID
0000-0002-7808-9872
Affiliation
Department of Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neurosciences, Institute of Psychology, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Korn, Lukas;
GND
1151918091
Affiliation
Department of Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neurosciences, Institute of Psychology, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Kovács, Gyula

The recognition of objects is strongly facilitated when they are presented in the context of other objects (Biederman, 1972). Such contexts facilitate perception and induce expectations of context-congruent objects (Trapp and Bar, 2015). The neural mechanisms underlying these facilitatory effects of context on object processing, however, are not yet fully understood. In the present study, we investigate how context-induced expectations affect subsequent object processing. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging and measured repetition suppression as a proxy for prediction error processing. Participants viewed pairs of alternating or repeated object images which were preceded by context-congruent, context-incongruent or neutral cues. We found a stronger repetition suppression in congruent as compared to incongruent or neutral cues in the object sensitive lateral occipital cortex. Interestingly, this stronger effect was driven by enhanced responses to alternating stimulus pairs in the congruent contexts, rather than by suppressed responses to repeated stimulus pairs, which emphasizes the contribution of surprise-related response enhancement for the context modulation on RS when expectations are violated. In addition, in the congruent condition, we discovered significant functional connectivity between object-responsive and frontal cortical regions, as well as between object-responsive regions and the fusiform gyrus. Our findings indicate that prediction errors, reflected in enhanced brain responses to violated contextual expectations, underlie the facilitating effect of context during object perception.

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