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Phasic modulation of visual representations during sustained attention

Sustained attention has long been thought to benefit perception in a continuous fashion, but recent evidence suggests that it affects perception in a discrete, rhythmic way. Periodic fluctuations in behavioral performance over time, and modulations of behavioral performance by the phase of spontaneo...

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Autores principales: van Es, Mats W. J., Marshall, Tom R., Spaak, Eelke, Jensen, Ole, Schoffelen, Jan‐Mathijs
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9543919/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33319447
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ejn.15084
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author van Es, Mats W. J.
Marshall, Tom R.
Spaak, Eelke
Jensen, Ole
Schoffelen, Jan‐Mathijs
author_facet van Es, Mats W. J.
Marshall, Tom R.
Spaak, Eelke
Jensen, Ole
Schoffelen, Jan‐Mathijs
author_sort van Es, Mats W. J.
collection PubMed
description Sustained attention has long been thought to benefit perception in a continuous fashion, but recent evidence suggests that it affects perception in a discrete, rhythmic way. Periodic fluctuations in behavioral performance over time, and modulations of behavioral performance by the phase of spontaneous oscillatory brain activity point to an attentional sampling rate in the theta or alpha frequency range. We investigated whether such discrete sampling by attention is reflected in periodic fluctuations in the decodability of visual stimulus orientation from magnetoencephalographic (MEG) brain signals. In this exploratory study, human subjects attended one of the two grating stimuli, while MEG was being recorded. We assessed the strength of the visual representation of the attended stimulus using a support vector machine (SVM) to decode the orientation of the grating (clockwise vs. counterclockwise) from the MEG signal. We tested whether decoder performance depended on the theta/alpha phase of local brain activity. While the phase of ongoing activity in the visual cortex did not modulate decoding performance, theta/alpha phase of activity in the frontal eye fields and parietal cortex, contralateral to the attended stimulus did modulate decoding performance. These findings suggest that phasic modulations of visual stimulus representations in the brain are caused by frequency‐specific top‐down activity in the frontoparietal attention network, though the behavioral relevance of these effects could not be established.
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spelling pubmed-95439192022-10-14 Phasic modulation of visual representations during sustained attention van Es, Mats W. J. Marshall, Tom R. Spaak, Eelke Jensen, Ole Schoffelen, Jan‐Mathijs Eur J Neurosci Special Issue Articles Sustained attention has long been thought to benefit perception in a continuous fashion, but recent evidence suggests that it affects perception in a discrete, rhythmic way. Periodic fluctuations in behavioral performance over time, and modulations of behavioral performance by the phase of spontaneous oscillatory brain activity point to an attentional sampling rate in the theta or alpha frequency range. We investigated whether such discrete sampling by attention is reflected in periodic fluctuations in the decodability of visual stimulus orientation from magnetoencephalographic (MEG) brain signals. In this exploratory study, human subjects attended one of the two grating stimuli, while MEG was being recorded. We assessed the strength of the visual representation of the attended stimulus using a support vector machine (SVM) to decode the orientation of the grating (clockwise vs. counterclockwise) from the MEG signal. We tested whether decoder performance depended on the theta/alpha phase of local brain activity. While the phase of ongoing activity in the visual cortex did not modulate decoding performance, theta/alpha phase of activity in the frontal eye fields and parietal cortex, contralateral to the attended stimulus did modulate decoding performance. These findings suggest that phasic modulations of visual stimulus representations in the brain are caused by frequency‐specific top‐down activity in the frontoparietal attention network, though the behavioral relevance of these effects could not be established. John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2021-01-06 2022-06 /pmc/articles/PMC9543919/ /pubmed/33319447 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ejn.15084 Text en © 2020 The Authors. European Journal of Neuroscience published by Federation of European Neuroscience Societies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Special Issue Articles
van Es, Mats W. J.
Marshall, Tom R.
Spaak, Eelke
Jensen, Ole
Schoffelen, Jan‐Mathijs
Phasic modulation of visual representations during sustained attention
title Phasic modulation of visual representations during sustained attention
title_full Phasic modulation of visual representations during sustained attention
title_fullStr Phasic modulation of visual representations during sustained attention
title_full_unstemmed Phasic modulation of visual representations during sustained attention
title_short Phasic modulation of visual representations during sustained attention
title_sort phasic modulation of visual representations during sustained attention
topic Special Issue Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9543919/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33319447
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ejn.15084
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