Postdiction: When Temporal Regularity Drives Space Perception through Prestimulus Alpha Oscillations

In postdiction, the last stimulus of a sequence changes the perception of the preceding stimuli. Postdiction has been reported in all sensory modalities, but its neural underpinnings remain poorly understood. In the rabbit illusion, a sequence of nonequidistant stimuli presented isochronously is perceived as equidistantly spaced. This illusion might be driven by an internal prior favoring a constant-speed motion. Here, we hypothesized that prestimulus alpha oscillations (8–12 Hz), known to correlate with perceptual expectations and biases, would reflect the degree to which perceptual reports are influenced by a constant-speed prior. Human participants were presented with ambiguous visual sequences while being recorded simultaneously with MEG and EEG: the same sequences yielded an illusory perception in about half the trials, allowing contrasting brain responses elicited by identical sequences causing distinct percepts. As a proxy of an individual’s prior, we used the percentage of perceived illusion and the detection criterion, assuming that a strong constant-speed prior would result in a higher rate of illusory percepts. We found that high frontoparietal alpha power was associated with perceiving the sequence according to the individual’s prior: participants with high susceptibility to the illusion would report the illusion, while participants with low susceptibility would report the veridical sequence. Additionally, we found that prestimulus alpha phase in occipitoparietal regions dissociated illusion from no-illusion trials. We interpret our results as suggesting that alpha power reflects an individual’s constant-speed prior, whereas alpha phase modulates sensory uncertainty.