In everyday life, we are constantly faced with noisy, incomplete, and ambiguous sensory information. Yet, we are usually able to perceive our environment quickly and accurately. A growing body of research suggests that the brain achieves this by actively generating predictions about what is likely to happen next and combining these expectations with incoming sensory signals. This predictive way of processing information is thought to play a central role in perception, learning, and decision-making.
At the same time, there is increasing recognition that altered predictive processes may contribute to neurological and psychiatric conditions in which perception becomes unreliable, such as hallucinations or sensory distortions. Improving scientific understanding of how predictions and sensory evidence are combined in the healthy brain is therefore important not only for basic neuroscience, but also for long-term progress in mental health research and clinical innovation.
The overall objective of the PredInCon project was to investigate how expectations and sensory information jointly determine what we consciously perceive, using hearing as a model system. Hearing provides an ideal test case because the auditory environment is highly dynamic and often noisy, requiring the brain to continuously anticipate and interpret incoming sounds. The project aimed to clarify how the brain can remain sensitive both to what is expected and to what is surprising, and how this balance shapes conscious experience.
To address these questions, the project developed a new experimental approach in which participants listened for faint sounds embedded in background noise. Crucially, the likelihood of hearing a particular sound was systematically manipulated, allowing to separate the effects of expectation from the strength of the sensory signal itself. This design made it possible to study how prior knowledge and sensory evidence are combined during perception.
By combining behavioural measurements with magnetoencephalographic data, the project set out to identify the brain processes that support this predictive form of perception. Through this approach, PredInCon contributes to European and international research priorities in brain health, cognitive neuroscience, and mental health by improving understanding of fundamental mechanisms of perception. The project’s results are expected to support the development of better theoretical models of brain function and, in the longer term, to inform research on conditions in which predictive processing may be disrupted. In this way, the project helps address the broader need for a deeper, mechanistic understanding of how the brain constructs conscious experience in complex and uncertain environments.
