Altered functional connectivity: A possible reason for reduced performance during visual cognition involving scene incongruence and negative affect

Object-context associations and valence are two unavoidable stimulus characteristics when it comes to the processing of natural visual scenes. In line with our previous studies exploring the parallel processing of context-congruity and valence, in the current study, we investigated the valence-specific differences in functional connectivity between congruent-incongruent picture pairs during binocular rivalry using high-density EEG. The functional connectivity measure was calculated using sLORETA during the perceptual dominance of congruent and incongruent stimuli in a time window of 400 ms before the response and compared within and between positive, negative, and neutral valence categories (84 Brodmann’s areas across 7 frequency bands) using t-tests. A significant difference in functional connectivity between congruent-incongruent picture pairs was seen only when associated with negative valence and a maximum number of area pairs showed differences in lower alpha 1 (7.1–9 Hz), upper alpha (11.1–13 Hz), and beta (13.1–30 Hz) frequency bands. The functional connectivity was significantly lower during incongruent perception between the area pairs which process mainly emotion, attention, memory, and semantic relations compared to their corresponding congruent stimuli. Similarly, negative incongruent percepts were found to have significantly lower connectivity between areas processing attention, emotion, and incongruence in the lower alpha 2 (9.1 −11 Hz) band when compared to positive incongruent percepts. Together, these results suggest that the perception of negative incongruence is associated with lower functional connectivity and this could be a possible reason for the increased error rates when faced with incongruity and negative affect during visual tasks.