Predicting the Multisensory Consequences of One’s Own Action: BOLD Suppression in Auditory and Visual Cortices

<div><p>Predictive mechanisms are essential to successfully interact with the environment and to compensate for delays in the transmission of neural signals. However, whether and how we predict <i>multisensory</i> action outcomes remains largely unknown. Here we investigated the existence of multisensory predictive mechanisms in a context where actions have outcomes in different modalities. During fMRI data acquisition auditory, visual and auditory-visual stimuli were presented in active and passive conditions. In the active condition, a self-initiated button press elicited the stimuli with variable short delays (0-417ms) between action and outcome, and participants had to detect the presence of a delay for auditory or visual outcome (task modality). In the passive condition, stimuli appeared automatically, and participants had to detect the number of stimulus modalities (unimodal/bimodal). For action consequences compared to identical but unpredictable control stimuli we observed <i>suppression</i> of the blood oxygen level depended (BOLD) response in a broad network including bilateral auditory and visual cortices. This effect was independent of task modality or stimulus modality and strongest for trials where no delay was detected (undetected</p>