Predictable tones elicit stimulus-specific suppression of evoked activity in auditory cortex

The auditory cortex is sensitive to many forms of acoustic regularity, resulting in suppressed neural activity for expected auditory events. It is unclear whether this activity reduction for expected events is the result of suppression of neurons that are tuned to the expected stimulus (i.e., dampening), or alternatively suppression of neurons that are tuned away from the expected stimulus (i.e., sharpening). In the present study, we adjudicated between these models by characterizing the effect of expectation on the ability to classify the identity of auditory stimuli from auditory neural activity patterns, using magnetoencephalography (MEG) in healthy human observers. Participants listened to pure tone pairs, in which the identity of the second tone was either expected or unexpected. The task of the participants was to detect a target tone, which deviated strongly from both the expected and unexpected tones. We found a strong suppression of the overall neural response in the expected condition compared to the unexpected condition. Linear classifiers showed a reduced ability to decode stimulus identity from event-related auditory fields in the expected condition compared to the unexpected condition. This suggests that stimulus-specific event-related activity is dampened for expected tones in auditory cortex.