Top-down inhibition of irrelevant information indexed by alpha rhythms is disrupted in migraine

Abstract

There is growing evidence that migraine is associated with attentional abnormalities, both during and outside migraine attacks, which would impact the cognitive processing of sensory stimulation. However, these attention alterations are poorly characterized and their neurophysiological basis is still unclear. Nineteen migraineurs without aura and nineteen healthy participants were recruited to perform a task which used visually-cued auditory targets and distracting sounds to evaluate conjointly top-down and bottom-up attention mechanisms. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) signals were recorded. We investigated anticipatory alpha activity (power increase and decrease) and distractor-induced gamma activity as markers for top-down (inhibition and facilitation) and bottom-up attention, respectively. Compared to healthy participants, migraineurs presented a significantly less prominent alpha power increase in visual areas in anticipation of the auditory target, indexing a reduced inhibition of task-irrelevant visual areas. However, there was no significant group difference regarding the alpha power decrease in the relevant auditory cortices in anticipation of the target, nor regarding the distractor-induced gamma power increase in the ventral attention network. These results in the alpha band suggest that top-down inhibitory processes in the visual cortices are deficient in migraine but there is no clear evidence supporting a disruption of top-down facilitatory attentional processes. This relative inability to suppress irrelevant sensory information may be underlying the self-reported increased distractibility and contribute to sensory disturbances in migraine.

High dream recall frequency is associated with an increase of both bottom-up and top-down attentional processes

“…Since none of these differences at the electrophysiological level seems to result in behavioral differences, it is quite likely that these effects compensate each other, in another but still efficient attentional balance between bottom-up and top-down processes. A similar pattern has been observed in patients with migraine (Masson et al 2020;Masson et al 2021).…”

Increase of both bottom-up and top-down attentional processes in high dream recallers

“…Since none of these differences at the electrophysiological level seems to result in behavioral differences, it is quite likely that these effects compensate each other, in another but still efficient balance between bottom-up and top-down processes. A similar pattern has been observed in patients with migraine (Masson et al, 2020;Masson et al, 2021). These results show that between-subject different neurophysiological profiles can result in similar cognitive performance in specific contexts.…”