A model of expectation effects in inferior temporal cortex

Preliminary experimental data suggests that primate inferior temporal cortex implements an automatic mechanism of expectation: inter-stimulus delay activity often increases or decreases monotonically. The slope of the activity is such that the maximum/minimum is always reached at the time of the onset of the second stimulus, adapting to the length of the interval. This mechanism could play an important role for a variety of neural computations that act on a time scale of a few seconds. We developed a model that reproduces such monotonically increasing activity by making use of short-term synaptic facilitation and network effects.