In 1867 the physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz described perception as relying on unconscious inferences (Helmholtz, 1867). Prediction and attention are theoretical constructs with a long tradition in psychology and biology.
From this perspective, the traditional distinction between bottom-up/exogenous and top-down/endogenous driven attention can be revisited and the classic concepts of attentional gain and attentional trace can be integrated. As predictions encode contents and confidence in the sensory data, and as gain can be modulated by the intention of the listener and by the predictability of the input, various possibilities for interactions between attention and prediction can be unfolded. Following the predictive coding theory, we suggest that prediction relates to predictions sent down from predictive models housed in higher levels of the processing hierarchy to lower levels and attention refers to gain modulation of the prediction error signal sent up to the higher level. attention may magnify the processing differences between predicted and unpredicted sounds. Studies jointly investigating attention and prediction revealed that these different mechanisms may interact, e.g.
However, when strongly predicted sounds are omitted, brain responses to silence resemble those elicited by sounds. Auditory attention typically yields enhanced brain activity, whereas auditory prediction often results in attenuated brain responses. Although both (attention and prediction) aid perception, they are rarely considered together. Prediction is a hypothetical mechanism in the service of perception that considers prior information when interpreting the sensorial input. Attention is a hypothetical mechanism in the service of perception that facilitates the processing of relevant information and inhibits the processing of irrelevant information.
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