Effect anticipation modulates deviance processing in the brain

Humans constantly perform actions to achieve desired goals in the environment. However, only very little is known about how actions influence stimulus processing. The present study addresses the question as to how performing an action that is associated with a particular auditory effect influences deviance processing in the brain. In the first part of the experiment, subjects performed left and right keypresses that were always followed by one of two tones, establishing an association between the particular action and the perceptual code of the effect tone. In the second part subjects were required to perform random series of left and right keypresses. The action triggered randomly one of the experimental stimuli of a typical oddball task (i.e., most of the time a standard tone and, rarely, a perceptually deviant tone). Deviant and standard stimuli were the same tones used as effect tones in the first phase of the experiment. Deviant stimuli elicited a larger P3a when the action that triggered stimulus presentation was associated with the standard tone than when it was associated with the deviant tone. This indicates a larger orienting response in the former case. The findings suggest that the context to which incoming sensory information is compared in order to detect deviant stimuli is codetermined by the sensory effects humans anticipate their actions to have.