Deviants violating higher-order auditory regularities can become predictive and facilitate behaviour

The human auditory system is believed to represent regularities inherent in auditory information in internal models. Sounds not matching the standard regularity (deviants) elicit prediction error, alerting the system to information not explainable within currently active models. Here, we examine the widely neglected characteristic of deviants bearing predictive information themselves. In a modified version of the oddball paradigm, using higher-order regularities, we set up different expectations regarding the sound following a deviant. Higher-order regularities were defined by the relation of pitch within tone pairs (rather than absolute pitch of individual tones). In a deviant detection task participants listened to oddball sequences including two deviant types following diametrically opposed rules: one occurred mostly in succession (high repetition probability) and the other mostly in isolation (low repetition probability). Participants in Experiment 1 were not informed (naïve), whereas in Experiment 2 they were made aware of the repetition rules. Response times significantly decreased from first to second deviant when repetition probability was high—albeit more in the presence of explicit rule knowledge. There was no evidence of a facilitation effect when repetition probability was low. Significantly more false alarms occurred in response to standards following high compared with low repetition probability deviants, but only in participants aware of the repetition rules. These findings provide evidence that not only deviants violating lower- but also higher-order regularities can inform predictions about auditory events. More generally, they confirm the utility of this new paradigm to gather further insights into the predictive properties of the human brain.