Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience

The anticipation of future events facilitates action preparation and fast responses. The identification of neural activity that underlies temporal predictive processes is a focus of current work. However, the neural representation of environmental temporal statistics remains unclear, limiting our understanding of temporal anticipation. The hazard rate of events is the canonical model of anticipatory behavior and its underlying neural activity. This model requires several complex and unstable computations. In contrast, we recently proposed a computationally simpler model of anticipatory behavior based on the event probability density function. Here, we recorded neural activity using magnetoencephalography (MEG) as participants anticipated auditory and visual events distributed in time. Behavioral results demonstrate that humans estimate the event probability density function, but not the hazard rate. We show that alpha band oscillatory activity in the right superior parietal lobule and temporoparietal junction area encodes event probability density prior to sensory cues. Our results reveal how neural dynamics represent temporal statistics in a fundamental cognitive function: the anticipation of events in time.