Detecting the unexpected

•Nervous systems often show adaptation to the on-going statistics of the sensory scene.•Such adaptive mechanisms may be expressed as sensitivity to stimulus deviance.•We review animal and human studies with particular focus on deviance detection in audition.

Sensory input is inherently dynamic and redundant. Humans and animals alike show a remarkable ability to extract regularities from the sensory scene and dynamically update their responses to the environment. This type of short-term plasticity occurs on time scales ranging from seconds to minutes (and possibly longer). Mismatch Negativity (a component of the human event-related potentials, MMN) and Stimulus Specific Adaptation (a single-neuron analogue, SSA) are two examples of this form of short-term plasticity. Conceptually, both are thought to express a form of surprise and to represent predictive processing. MMN and SSA therefore provide us with handles for investigating this important time scale of short-term plasticity.