Discovery, Interruption, and Updating of Auditory Regularities in Memory: Evidence from Low-Frequency Brain Dynamics in Human MEG

During passive listening, the brain maintains a hierarchy of predictive models to monitor the statistics of its surroundings. The automatic discovery of regular patterns has been associated with a gradual increase in sustained tonic M/EEG activity, sourced in auditory, hippocampal, and frontal areas - reflecting evidence accumulation and establishment of a regularity model. Conversely, when a regular pattern is interrupted, the sustained activity drops - indicating disengagement from the model. However, how such models are established in and retrieved from memory as well as the conditions under which they are activated and interrupted remain underexplored. In this MEG experiment (N=26; both sexes), we examined how neural responses related to model establishment and interruption are influenced by (1) the rate of stimulus presentation (tone presentation rate 20 Hz vs. 40 Hz), and (2) the novelty of the experienced acoustic structure (novel vs resumed REG pattern). The results show that (1) the dynamics of model interruption and establishment are independent of stimulus presentation rate, and that (2) model establishment occurred much faster when an experienced vs novel pattern was presented after pattern interruption, suggesting re-activation of the stored original model facilitated by the hippocampus. (3) Finally, sustained response rises in response to pattern establishment and interruption were localized in auditory, hippocampal, and frontal sources, supporting top-down model information flow. These results unveil the temporal dynamics and neural network underlying the brain's construction and selection of predictive models to monitor changes in sensory statistics.