The role of brain oscillations in predicting the sensory consequences of your actions

Being able to predict self-generated sensory consequences is an important feature of normal brain functioning. In the auditory domain, self-generated sounds lead to smaller brain responses compared to externally generated sounds. Here we investigated the role of brain oscillations underlying this effect. With magnetoencephalography, we show that self-generated sounds are associated with increased pre-stimulus alpha power and decreased post-stimulus gamma power and alpha/beta phase locking in auditory cortex. All these oscillatory changes are correlated with changes in evoked responses. Furthermore, they correlate with each other across participants, supporting the idea that they constitute a neural information processing sequence for self-generated sounds, with pre-stimulus alpha power representing prediction and post-stimulus gamma power representing prediction error, which is further processed with post-stimulus alpha/beta phase resetting. Additional cross-trial analysis provides further support for the proposed sequence that might reflect a general mechanism for the prediction of self-generated sensory input.