Significance: Sleeping disrupts the conscious awareness of external sounds. We investigated the stage of processing at which this disruption occurs. In the awake brain, when a regular sequence of sounds is presented, a hierarchy of brain areas uses the available regularities to predict forthcoming sounds and to respond with a series of “prediction error” signals when these predictions are violated. Using simultaneous recordings of electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography signals, we discovered that both short-term and long-term brain responses to auditory prediction errors are disrupted during non-rapid eye movement and rapid eye movement sleep; however, the brain still exhibits detectable auditory responses and a capacity to habituate to frequently repeated sounds. Thus, sleep appears to selectively affect the brain’s prediction and error detection systems.

Significance: Newborns show a remarkable ability to detect faces even minutes after birth, an ecologically fundamental skill that is instrumental for interacting with their conspecifics. What are the neural bases of this expertise? Using EEG and a slow oscillatory visual stimulation, we identified a reliable response specific to facelike patterns in newborns, for which underlying cortical sources overlap with the adult face-specific cortical circuit. This suggests that the development of face perception in infants might rely on an early cortical route specialized in face processing already shortly after birth.

Significance: How does learning to read affect visual processing? We addressed this issue by scanning adults who could not attend school during childhood and either remained illiterate or acquired partial literacy during adulthood (ex-illiterates). By recording event-related brain responses, we obtained a high-temporal resolution description of how illiterate and literate adults differ in terms of early visual responses. The results show that learning to read dramatically enhances the magnitude, precision, and invariance of early visual coding, within 200 ms of stimulus onset, and also enhances later neural activity. Literacy effects were found not only for the expected category of expertise (letter strings), but also extended to other visual stimuli, confirming the benefits of literacy on early visual processing.