Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience

Preparation is a top-down phenomenon known to improve performance. Here we study the preparatory bases of two factors often confounded in the literature: Selective Attention (relevance) and Perceptual Expectations (probability). Recent EEG findings show that although both induce anticipatory preactivations, their underlying patterns differ. Here, we extend these findings to spatial grounds by using fMRI. We applied multivariate decoding to data obtained during a cue-target paradigm. In different blocks, cues gave information about the relevance or probability of incoming target stimuli. The anticipated stimulus category was encoded in both conditions, mostly in different brain regions and with differential overlap with actual target perception. Crucially, there was little cross-classification across contexts, indicating lack of common neural coding across relevance and probability contexts. Overall, our results stress the specificity of anticipatory neural processing depending on its informative role.