What is next? Predictable visual sequences are encoded with anticipatory biases and reduced neural responses

Abstract

Objects in motion follow predictable trajectories that the brain can easily anticipate. We investigated the underlying neural mechanisms, focusing on a form of representational momentum (RM), whereby the final state of a rotating object is misperceived along its future trajectory. Participants viewed two simultaneous streams of oriented gratings, one rotating predictably and the other random, and were instructed to attend to one of the two. Using electroencephalogram (EEG) steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) and decoding analysis, we found that attending to rotational (RTT) sequences led to reduced neural response amplitude and systematic anticipatory shifts in the neural representation of orientation, relative to random (RDD) sequences. These anticipatory biases emerged at early post-stimulus latencies and mirrored the bias observed in the behavioral task. Our findings suggest that the brain leverages internalized dynamics to form stable anticipatory representations with reduced neural activity strength.