Emotion, attention, and motivation act as weights or modulators of the prediction error itself, guiding behaviour, action and learning through neurotransmitters such as dopamine.

Emotion is fundamental to human life, survival and well-being, and music is one of the strongest and most universal sources of human emotion and pleasure. Meyer formulated the idea that musical anticipation and incongruity, i.e. elements that do not fit with schematic, veridical or short term memory-based predictions, may be a fundamental source of music emotion and pleasure, an idea that was later pursued and expanded on by Huron. The Emotion group investigates predictive mechanisms related to emotional and pleasure processing in the brain.