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Trial-by-Trial Variations in Subjective Attentional State are Reflected in Ongoing Prestimulus EEG Alpha Oscillations

Parieto-occipital electroencephalogram (EEG) alpha power and subjective reports of attentional state are both associated with visual attention and awareness, but little is currently known about the relationship between these two measures. Here, we bring together these two literatures to explore the...

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Autores principales: Macdonald, James S. P., Mathan, Santosh, Yeung, Nick
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Research Foundation 2011
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3110334/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21687452
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00082
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author Macdonald, James S. P.
Mathan, Santosh
Yeung, Nick
author_facet Macdonald, James S. P.
Mathan, Santosh
Yeung, Nick
author_sort Macdonald, James S. P.
collection PubMed
description Parieto-occipital electroencephalogram (EEG) alpha power and subjective reports of attentional state are both associated with visual attention and awareness, but little is currently known about the relationship between these two measures. Here, we bring together these two literatures to explore the relationship between alpha activity and participants’ introspective judgments of attentional state as each varied from trial-to-trial during performance of a visual detection task. We collected participants’ subjective ratings of perceptual decision confidence and attentional state on continuous scales on each trial of a rapid serial visual presentation detection task while recording EEG. We found that confidence and attentional state ratings were largely uncorrelated with each other, but both were strongly associated with task performance and post-stimulus decision-related EEG activity. Crucially, attentional state ratings were also negatively associated with prestimulus EEG alpha power. Attesting to the robustness of this association, we were able to classify attentional state ratings via prestimulus alpha power on a single-trial basis. Moreover, when we repeated these analyses after smoothing the time series of attentional state ratings and alpha power with increasingly large sliding windows, both the correlations and classification performance improved considerably, with the peaks occurring at a sliding window size of approximately 7 min worth of trials. Our results therefore suggest that slow fluctuations in attentional state in the order of minutes are reflected in spontaneous alpha power. Since these subjective attentional state ratings were associated with objective measures of both behavior and neural activity, we suggest that they provide a simple and effective estimate of task engagement that could prove useful in operational settings that require human operators to maintain a sustained focus of visual attention.
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spelling pubmed-31103342011-06-16 Trial-by-Trial Variations in Subjective Attentional State are Reflected in Ongoing Prestimulus EEG Alpha Oscillations Macdonald, James S. P. Mathan, Santosh Yeung, Nick Front Psychol Neuroscience Parieto-occipital electroencephalogram (EEG) alpha power and subjective reports of attentional state are both associated with visual attention and awareness, but little is currently known about the relationship between these two measures. Here, we bring together these two literatures to explore the relationship between alpha activity and participants’ introspective judgments of attentional state as each varied from trial-to-trial during performance of a visual detection task. We collected participants’ subjective ratings of perceptual decision confidence and attentional state on continuous scales on each trial of a rapid serial visual presentation detection task while recording EEG. We found that confidence and attentional state ratings were largely uncorrelated with each other, but both were strongly associated with task performance and post-stimulus decision-related EEG activity. Crucially, attentional state ratings were also negatively associated with prestimulus EEG alpha power. Attesting to the robustness of this association, we were able to classify attentional state ratings via prestimulus alpha power on a single-trial basis. Moreover, when we repeated these analyses after smoothing the time series of attentional state ratings and alpha power with increasingly large sliding windows, both the correlations and classification performance improved considerably, with the peaks occurring at a sliding window size of approximately 7 min worth of trials. Our results therefore suggest that slow fluctuations in attentional state in the order of minutes are reflected in spontaneous alpha power. Since these subjective attentional state ratings were associated with objective measures of both behavior and neural activity, we suggest that they provide a simple and effective estimate of task engagement that could prove useful in operational settings that require human operators to maintain a sustained focus of visual attention. Frontiers Research Foundation 2011-05-10 /pmc/articles/PMC3110334/ /pubmed/21687452 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00082 Text en Copyright © 2011 Macdonald, Mathan and Yeung. http://www.frontiersin.org/licenseagreement This is an open-access article subject to a non-exclusive license between the authors and Frontiers Media SA, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and other Frontiers conditions are complied with.
spellingShingle Neuroscience
Macdonald, James S. P.
Mathan, Santosh
Yeung, Nick
Trial-by-Trial Variations in Subjective Attentional State are Reflected in Ongoing Prestimulus EEG Alpha Oscillations
title Trial-by-Trial Variations in Subjective Attentional State are Reflected in Ongoing Prestimulus EEG Alpha Oscillations
title_full Trial-by-Trial Variations in Subjective Attentional State are Reflected in Ongoing Prestimulus EEG Alpha Oscillations
title_fullStr Trial-by-Trial Variations in Subjective Attentional State are Reflected in Ongoing Prestimulus EEG Alpha Oscillations
title_full_unstemmed Trial-by-Trial Variations in Subjective Attentional State are Reflected in Ongoing Prestimulus EEG Alpha Oscillations
title_short Trial-by-Trial Variations in Subjective Attentional State are Reflected in Ongoing Prestimulus EEG Alpha Oscillations
title_sort trial-by-trial variations in subjective attentional state are reflected in ongoing prestimulus eeg alpha oscillations
topic Neuroscience
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3110334/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21687452
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00082
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