Search for a command to run...
Auditory-motor learning is critical in mastering the production of complex sounds, such as speaking and playing music. It is anchored upon internal models of interactions between actions and their sensory consequences, which are fine-tuned by minimizing the errors between the predicted and received sound. Here, we applied the concept of surprisal to a piano-playing task to probe the neural dynamics of sensorimotor learning. Specifically, during play, the key-pitch map was changed unpredictably among three map configurations: normal, inverted, and shifted-inverted. At the change boundaries, a signature of violated motor-to-auditory predictions was found in the auditory evoked responses at N100 which could not be attributed to either purely auditory surprisals or motor execution errors. This surprisal is modulated by short-term context, with greater surprise following longer periods of no map change, indicating that the brain continuously tracks short-term map contexts and rapidly adapts to them. In contrast, 30 minutes of extended goal-directed training on a single map modulated P50 amplitude only for that map, which can be explained by a slow, persistent modulation of motor predictions from the auditory signals. Hence, while auditory predictions from motor actions are rapidly and implicitly learned within short-term contexts, the complementary process of adjusting motor inferences from auditory inputs requires targeted training sustained over time. Our approach of studying auditory-motor surprisal in time-varying sequences reveals that auditory-motor learning is fast, context-sensitive, and shaped by both short-and long-term experience.