Attentional changes in pre-stimulus oscillatory activity within early visual cortex are predictive of human visual performance

Attentional Cues Affect Accuracy and Reaction Time via Different Cognitive and Neural Processes

“…Second, our data reveal that the anticipatory suppression of neuronal oscillations is an important process underlying accuracy improvement with symbolic cueing. Previously this neural phenomenon has been associated with both accuracy (Thut et al, 2006;Yamagishi et al, 2008;Haegens et al, 2011a) and RT improvement (Thut et al, 2006;Haegens et al, 2011a;van Ede et al, 2011). Our results show that RT improvement can also occur in the absence of this neural phenomenon, namely at short cue-target-intervals.…”

Attentional gain and processing capacity limits predict the propensity to neglect unexpected visual stimuli

“…This also raises the question that the sensitivity to low-level visual features as reflect as early visual evoked potentials (N80 and C1) may be involved in the theta phase-reset. Similarly, the N2 may be subject to analogous influences: alpha power during this latency may drive a multi-band change of activity linked to early top-down modulation for preparing early visual processors to receive visual inputs (Yamagishi, Callan, Anderson, & Kawato, 2008). Palva and Palva (2007) discuss the subject of brain oscillations and report a series of studies on the role of theta band, where it was found synchronised with alpha and beta during stimulus processing and in response to task workload (see [11,60] as cited in Palva & Palva, 2007).…”

“…We explored the alpha band range in the pre-stimulus period since its modulation has been shown to predict performance and awareness of stimuli (Mathewson, Gratton, Fabiani, Beck, & Ro, 2009;Yamagishi, Callan, Anderson, & Kawato, 2008). Moreover, alpha, beta, and theta bands during the event-evoked period were also assessed since attentional allocation of resources is thought to play a multi-band (alpha, beta and theta) effect during visual processing (Güntekin, Emek-Savaş, Kurt, Yener, & Başar, 2013;Bastiaansen & Hagoort, 2003;Palva & Palva, 2007;Jensen, Bonnefond, & VanRullen, 2012).…”

“…ROIs were identified on the basis of previous findings that showed increased alpha power during the period prior the presentation of a stimulus (Yamagishi et al, 2008), but also in the N1 latency and in later processing (>300 ms) in a form of a dissociated alpha band modulation (i.e., early/late alpha enhancement/suppression; Rana & Vaina, 2014;Capilla, Schoffelen, Paterson, Thut, Gross, 2014; see also Palva & Palva, 2007); moreover, modulation in the theta and beta band have also been found to be respectively indicative of good performance (i.e., encoding the location of the target stimulus; Bastiaansen & Hagoort, 2003;Klimesch, 1999) and increased visual attention (Güntekin et al 2013). Hence, the following ROIs were investigated: pre-stimulus alpha Power estimates (in dB) for the bands of interest and the level of saliency (low/high) were submitted to logistic regressions to test whether they were predictive of the level of inattention (similar analyses assessing behavioural performance on the basis of the power estimates of frequency bands can be found in Yamagishi, Callan, Anderson, & Kawato, 2008, for pre-stimulus period; see also Jensen et al 2012, for latency after the on-set of the array).…”

Background and evoked activity and their interaction in the human brain

“…The primary sources of working memory-dependent alpha activity were located in parieto-occipital areas [22,24]. Also, attentional shifts have been demonstrated to modulate oscillatory activity in the human visual cortex [25][26][27], and attentional mechanisms operating within the frontoparietal network have been suggested to exert a topdown control on early visual areas [27,28].…”