Suppressed Sensory Response to Predictable Object Stimuli throughout the Ventral Visual Stream

It has been suggested that the brain fundamentally relies on predictions and constructs models of the world to make sense of sensory information. Previous research on the neural basis of prediction has documented suppressed neural responses to expected compared with unexpected stimuli. In the present study, we demonstrate robust expectation suppression throughout the entire ventral visual stream, and underlying this suppression a dampening of the sensory representation in object-selective visual cortex, but not in primary visual cortex. Together, our results provide novel evidence in support of theories conceptualizing perception as an active inference process, which selectively dampens cortical representations of predictable objects. This dampening may support our ability to automatically filter out irrelevant, predictable objects.