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Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 12, 1:30 – 4:30 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Neural oscillations encode context-based informativeness during naturalistic free viewing

Songyun Bai¹, Philip Sulewski², Carmen Amme³, Peter König³, Tim C Kietzmann³, Marius V Peelen, Eelke Spaak¹; ¹Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, ²Institute of Cognitive Science, Osnabrück University, Universität Osnabrück, ³Universität Osnabrück

Presenter: Songyun Bai

In everyday vision, humans actively sample the environment by moving their eyes several times per second. While predictive processing accounts have been successful in explaining neural oscillatory activity during fixated viewing in non-human primates, whether these accounts extend to free viewing and humans is still unknown. To address this, we developed a novel analysis pipeline combining large-sample, head-fixed MEG, eye-tracking, and a generative deep neural network model to investigate how the brain encodes visual input with varying levels of contextual predictability. Our results show that the informativeness of the current fixation is positively associated with the occurrence of alpha-beta oscillations across large parts of posterior cortex. It is furthermore positively associated with gamma-band activity, though more specifically localized to central posterior regions corresponding to the foveal representation. In conclusion, contextual predictability is rapidly and transiently encoded in neural oscillations in different frequency bands during free viewing.

Topic Area: Brain Networks & Neural Dynamics

Extended Abstract: Full Text PDF