Expectations Change the Signatures and Timing of Electrophysiological Correlates of Perceptual Awareness

Previous experience allows the brain to predict what comes next. How these expectations affect conscious experience is poorly understood. In particular, it is unknown whether and when expectations interact with sensory evidence in granting access to conscious perception, and how this is reflected electrophysiologically. Here, we parametrically manipulate sensory evidence and expectations while measuring event-related potentials in human subjects to assess the time course of evoked responses that correlate with subjective visibility, the properties of the stimuli, and/or perceptual expectations. We found that expectations lower the threshold of conscious perception and reduce the latency of neuronal signatures differentiating seen and unseen stimuli. Without expectations, this differentiation occurs ∼300 ms and with expectations ∼200 ms after stimulus in occipitoparietal sensors. The amplitude of this differentiating response component (P2) decreases as visibility increases, regardless of whether this increase is attributable to enhanced sensory evidence and/or the gradual buildup of perceptual expectations. Importantly, at matched performance levels, responses to seen and unseen stimuli differed regardless of the physical stimulus properties. These findings indicate that the latency of the neuronal correlates of access to consciousness depend on whether access is driven by stimulus saliency or by a combination of expectations and sensory evidence.