Unsuppressible Repetition Suppression and exemplar-specific Expectation Suppression in the Fusiform Face Area

Recent work casts Repetition Suppression (RS), i.e. the reduced neural response to repeated stimuli, as the consequence of reduced surprise for repeated inputs. This research, along with other studies documenting Expectation Suppression, i.e. reduced responses to expected stimuli, emphasizes the role of expectations and predictive codes in perception. Here, we use fMRI to further characterize the nature of predictive signals in the human brain. Prior to scanning, participants were implicitly exposed to associations within face pairs. Critically, we found that this resulted in exemplar-specific Expectation Suppression in the fusiform face-sensitive area (FFA): individual faces that could be predicted from the associations elicited reduced FFA responses, as compared to unpredictable faces. Thus, predictive signals in the FFA are specific to face exemplars, and not only generic to the category of face stimuli. In addition, we show that under such circumstances, the occurrence of surprising repetitions did not trigger enhanced brain responses, as had been recently hypothesized, but still suppressed responses, suggesting that repetition suppression might be partly ‘unsuppressible’. Repetition effects cannot be fully modulated by expectations, which supports the recent view that expectation and repetition effects rest on partially independent mechanisms. Altogether, our study sheds light on the nature of expectation signals along the perceptual system.