Shared and diverging neural dynamics underlying false and veridical perception

We often mistake visual noise for meaningful images, which sometimes appear to be as convincing as veridical percepts. This suggests that there is considerable overlap between the mechanisms that underlie false and veridical perception. Yet, false percepts must arise at least in part from internally generated signals. Here, we apply multivariate analyses to human MEG data to study the overlap between veridical and false perception across two discrete stages of perceptual inference: discrimination of content (what did I see) and detection (did I see something?). To this end, participants performed a visual discrimination task requiring them to indicate the orientation of a noisy grating, as well as their confidence in having seen a grating. Importantly, on 50% of trials no gratings were presented (noise-only trials). On a subset of these noise-only trials, participants reported seeing a grating with high confidence, dubbed here false percepts. We found that a sensory signal reflecting the content of these false percepts was present both before and after stimulus onset. Uniquely, high confidence false, but not veridical, percepts were associated with increased pre-stimulus high alpha/low beta [11-14Hz] power, potentially reflecting enhanced reliance on top-down signalling on false percept trials. Later on, a shared neural code reflecting confidence in stimulus presence emerged for both false and veridical percepts, as revealed by cross-decoding. These findings suggest that false percepts arise through sensory-like signals reflecting both content and detection signals, similar to veridical percepts, with an increase in pre-stimulus alpha/beta power uniquely contributing to false percepts. Significance statementThe neural mechanisms underlying false percepts are likely different from those that underlie veridical perception, as the former are generated endogenously, whereas the latter are the result of an external stimulus. Yet, false percepts often get confused for veridical perception, suggesting a converging mechanism. This study explores the extent to which the mechanisms diverge and converge. We found that both high confidence false and veridical percepts were accompanied by content-specific stimulus-like orientation signals, as well as a shared signal reflecting perceptual confidence. In contrast, we found that false, but not veridical, percepts were preceded by increased high alpha/low beta [11-14 Hz] power, possibly reflecting a reliance on endogenous signals.