Journal Article

Alpha oscillations and traveling waves: Signatures of predictive coding?

Alamia, Andrea, VanRullen, Rufin

2019

Overview

Predictive coding is a key mechanism to understand the computational processes underlying brain functioning: in a hierarchical network, higher levels predict the activity of lower levels, and the unexplained residuals (i.e., prediction errors) are passed back to higher layers. Because of its recursive nature, we wondered whether predictive coding could be related to brain oscillatory dynamics. First, we show that a simple 2-level predictive coding model of visual cortex, with physiological communication delays between levels, naturally gives rise to alpha-band rhythms, similar to experimental observations. Then, we demonstrate that a multilevel version of the same model can explain the occurrence of oscillatory traveling waves across levels, both forward (during visual stimulation) and backward (during rest). Remarkably, the predictions of our model are matched by the analysis of 2 independent electroencephalography (EEG) datasets, in which we observed oscillatory traveling waves in both directions.

• Publisher: Public Library of Science,Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subject: Adult / Alpha Rhythm - physiology / Analysis / Biology and Life Sciences / Brain / Coding / Cognition & reasoning / Cognitive science / Cognitive Sciences / Communication / Computational neuroscience / Datasets as Topic / EEG / Electroencephalography / Feedback / Female / Fourier transforms / Humans / Level (quantity) / Life Sciences / Male / Medicine and Health Sciences / Model matching / Models, Neurological / Nerve Net - physiology / Neural coding / Neurons and Cognition / Neuroscience / Noise / Ordinary differential equations / Oscillations / Photic Stimulation / Physical Sciences / Physiological aspects / Predictions / Research and Analysis Methods / Rest - physiology / Sensory perception / Social Sciences / Traveling waves / Visual cortex / Visual Cortex - physiology / Visual stimuli