Although they just discovered the mechanism, we've known that this happens for quite some time. It's something you can take advantage of in UX design, for example, because if you provide a subtle queue before something new happens to trigger the brain, the new thing will be perceived faster.
They have known it too. The first cited experiments in this article were done in 2012. I wonder how long it's existed as a theory in neuroscience.
My model, which was basically guessed from common-sense principles (what would a flip-flop's output look like if there were no clock and the "update" signal were not discrete?), used equations that were similar to what would eventually become the GRU update equations. And the fit with the data was gorgeous: it took one parameter (a time constant that scaled how quickly sensory information was integrated with the current prediction) and the R^2 was north of 90%.