Nature of omission responses: prediction error vs entrainment

Ascertain whether omission responses elicited in periodic auditory paradigms reflect prediction error computations or are instead attributable to neural entrainment to the rhythmic presentation of stimuli.

Background

Prior work on omission paradigms—where regularly presented sounds are occasionally replaced by silence—often treats omission responses as prediction errors. However, many studies did not distinguish absence-related representations from feature-based ones and did not manipulate beliefs about the probability of stimulus presence, leaving room for alternative explanations such as neural entrainment.

The authors developed an abstract-rule-based paradigm to differentiate prediction-related omission responses from entrainment-related effects, proposing that responses scaling with presence plausibility index an absence prediction error while passive entrainment would produce omission responses regardless of expectancy.