Alpha Oscillations and Feedback Processing in Visual Cortex for Conscious Perception

Alpha Oscillations and Temporal Binding Windows in Perception-A Critical Review and Best Practice Guidelines

An intriguing question in cognitive neuroscience is whether alpha oscillations shape how the brain transforms the continuous sensory inputs into distinct percepts. According to the alpha temporal resolution hypothesis, sensory signals arriving within a single alpha cycle are integrated, whereas those in separate cycles are segregated. Consequently, shorter alpha cycles should be associated with smaller temporal binding windows and higher temporal resolution. However, the evidence supporting this hypothesis is contentious, and the neural mechanisms remain unclear. In this review, we first elucidate the alpha temporal resolution hypothesis and the neural circuitries that generate alpha oscillations. We then critically evaluate study designs, experimental paradigms, psychophysics, and neurophysiological analyses that have been employed to investigate the role of alpha frequency in temporal binding. Through the lens of this methodological framework, we then review evidence from between-subject, within-subject, and causal perturbation studies. Our review highlights the inherent interpretational ambiguities posed by previous study designs and experimental paradigms and the extensive variability in analysis choices across studies. We also suggest best practice recommendations that may help to guide future research. To establish a mechanistic role of alpha frequency in temporal parsing, future research is needed that demonstrates its causal effects on the temporal binding window with consistent, experimenter-independent methods.

Alpha-Band Frequency and Temporal Windows in Perception: A Review and Living Meta-analysis of 27 Experiments (and Counting)

Temporal windows in perception refer to windows of time within which distinct stimuli interact to influence perception. A simple example is two temporally proximal stimuli fusing into a single percept. It has long been hypothesized that the human alpha rhythm (an 8- to 13-Hz neural oscillation maximal over posterior cortex) is linked to temporal windows, with higher frequencies corresponding to shorter windows and finer-grained temporal resolution. This hypothesis has garnered support from studies demonstrating a correlation between individual differences in alpha-band frequency (IAF) and behavioral measures of temporal processing. However, nonsignificant effects have also been reported. Here, we review and meta-analyze 27 experiments correlating IAF with measures of visual and audiovisual temporal processing. Our results estimate the true correlation in the population to be between .39 and .53, a medium-to-large effect. The effect held when considering visual or audiovisual experiments separately, when examining different IAF estimation protocols (i.e., eyes open and eyes closed), and when using analysis choices that favor a null result. Our review shows that (1) effects have been internally and independently replicated, (2) several positive effects are based on larger sample sizes than the null effects, and (3) many reported null effects are actually in the direction predicted by the hypothesis. A free interactive web app was developed to allow users to replicate our meta-analysis and change or update the study selection at will, making this a "living" meta-analysis (randfxmeta.streamlit.app). We discuss possible factors underlying null reports, design recommendations, and open questions for future research.

Gender-Specific Interactions in a Visual Object Recognition Task in Persons with Opioid Use Disorder

Opioid use disorder (OUD)-associated overdose deaths have reached epidemic proportions worldwide over the past two decades, with death rates for men reported at twice the rate for women. Using a controlled, cross-sectional, age-matched (18-56 y) design to better understand the cognitive neuroscience of OUD, we evaluated the electroencephalographic (EEG) responses of male and female participants with OUD vs. age- and gender-matched non-OUD controls during a simple visual object recognition Go/No-Go task. Overall, women had significantly slower reaction times (RTs) than men. In addition, EEG N200 and P300 event-related potential (ERP) amplitudes for non-OUD controls were significantly larger for men, while their latencies were significantly shorter than for women. However, while N200 and P300 amplitudes were not significantly affected by OUD for either men or women in this task, latencies were also affected differentially in men vs. women with OUD. Accordingly, for both N200 and P300, male OUD participants exhibited longer latencies while female OUD participants exhibited shorter ones than in non-OUD controls. Additionally, robust oscillations were found in all participants during a feedback message associated with performance in the task. Although alpha and beta power during the feedback message were significantly greater for men than women overall, both alpha and beta oscillations exhibited significantly lower power in all participants with OUD. Taken together, these findings suggest important gender by OUD differences in cognitive processing and reflection of performance in this simple visual task.

Prestimulus oscillatory brain activity interacts with evoked recurrent processing to facilitate conscious visual perception

We investigated whether prestimulus alpha-band oscillatory activity and stimulus-elicited recurrent processing interact to facilitate conscious visual perception. Participants tried to perceive a visual stimulus that was perceptually masked through object substitution masking (OSM). We showed that attenuated prestimulus alpha power was associated with greater negative-polarity stimulus-evoked ERP activity that resembled the visual awareness negativity (VAN), previously argued to reflect recurrent processing related to conscious perception. This effect, however, was not associated with better perception. Instead, when prestimulus alpha power was elevated, a preferred prestimulus alpha phase was associated with a greater VAN-like negativity, which was then associated with better cue perception. Cue perception was worse when prestimulus alpha power was elevated but the stimulus occurred at a nonoptimal prestimulus alpha phase and the VAN-like negativity was low. Our findings suggest that prestimulus alpha activity at a specific phase enables temporally selective recurrent processing that facilitates conscious perception in OSM.

Investigating the role of the foveal cortex in peripheral object discrimination

Peripheral object discrimination is hindered by a central dynamic mask presented between 150 and 300 ms after stimulus onset. The mask is thought to interfere with task-relevant feedback coming from higher visual areas to the foveal cortex in V1. Fan et al. (2016) supported this hypothesis by showing that the effect of mask can be further delayed if the task requires mental manipulation of the peripheral target. The main purpose of this study was to better characterize the temporal dynamics of foveal feedback. Specifically, in two experiments we have shown that (1) the effect of foveal noise mask is sufficiently robust to be replicated in an online data collection (2) in addition to a change in sensitivity the mask affects also the criterion, which becomes more conservative; (3) the expected dipper function for sensitivity approximates a quartic with a global minimum at 94 ms, while the best fit for criterion is a quintic with a global maximum at 174 ms; (4) the power spectrum analysis of perceptual oscillations in sensitivity data shows a cyclic effect of mask at 3 and 12 Hz. Overall, our results show that foveal noise affects sensitivity in a cyclic manner, with a global dip emerging earlier than previously found. The noise also affects the response bias, even though with a different temporal profile. We, therefore, suggest that foveal noise acts on two distinct feedback mechanisms, a faster perceptual feedback followed by a slower cognitive feedback.

Power spectrum slope confounds estimation of instantaneous oscillatory frequency

Oscillatory neural dynamics are highly non-stationary and require methods capable of quantifying time-resolved changes in oscillatory activity in order to understand neural function. Recently, a method termed 'frequency sliding' was introduced to estimate the instantaneous frequency of oscillatory activity, providing a means of tracking temporal changes in the dominant frequency within a sub-band of field potential recordings. Here, the ability of frequency sliding to recover ground-truth oscillatory frequency in simulated data is tested while the exponent (slope) of the 1/f^x component of the signal power spectrum is systematically varied, mimicking real electrophysiological data. The results show that 1) in the presence of 1/f activity, frequency sliding systematically underestimates the true frequency of the signal, 2) the magnitude of underestimation is correlated with the steepness of the slope, suggesting that, if unaccounted for, slope changes could be misinterpreted as frequency changes, 3) the impact of slope on frequency estimates interacts with oscillation amplitude, indicating that changes in oscillation amplitude alone may also influence instantaneous frequency estimates in the presence of strong 1/f activity; and 4) analysis parameters such as filter bandwidth and location also mediate the influence of slope on estimated frequency, indicating that these settings should be considered when interpreting estimates obtained via frequency sliding. The origin of these biases resides in the output of the filtering step of frequency sliding, whose energy is biased towards lower frequencies precisely because of the 1/f structure of the data. We discuss several strategies to mitigate these biases and provide a proof-of-principle for a 1/f normalization strategy.

No evidence for a single oscillator underlying discrete visual percepts

Theories of perception based on discrete sampling posit that visual consciousness is reconstructed based on snapshot-like perceptual moments, as opposed to being updated continuously. According to a model proposed by Schneider (2018), discrete sampling can explain both the flash-lag and the Fröhlich illusion, whereby a lag in the conscious updating of a moving stimulus alters its perceived spatial location in comparison to stationary stimulus. The alpha-band frequency, which is associated with phasic modulation of stimulus detection and the temporal resolution of perception, has been proposed to reflect the duration of perceptual moments. The goal of this study was to determine whether a single oscillator (e.g., alpha) is underlying the duration of perceptual moments, which would predict that the point of subjective equality (PSE) in the flash-lag and Fröhlich illusions are positively correlated across individuals. Although our displays induced robust flash-lag and Fröhlich effects, virtually zero correlation was seen between the PSE in the two illusions, indicating that the illusion magnitudes are unrelated across observers. These findings suggest that, if discrete sampling theory is true, these illusory percepts either rely on different oscillatory frequencies or not on oscillations at all. Alternatively, discrete sampling may not be the mechanism underlying these two motion illusions or our methods were ill-suited to test the theory.

Visual Modulation of Resting State α Oscillations

Once thought to simply reflect passive cortical idling, recent studies have demonstrated that α oscillations play a causal role in cognition and perception. However, whether and how cognitive or sensory processes modulate various components of the α rhythm is poorly understood. Sensory input and resting states were manipulated in human subjects while electroencephalography (EEG) activity was recorded in three conditions: eyes-open fixating on a visual stimulus, eyes-open without visual input (darkness), and eyes-closed without visual input (darkness). We show that α power and peak frequency increase when visual input is reduced compared to the eyes open, fixating condition. These results suggest that increases in α power reflect a shift from an exteroceptive to interoceptive state and that increases in peak frequency following restricted visual input (darkness) may reflect increased sampling of the external environment in order to detect stimuli. They further demonstrate how sensory information modulates α and the importance of selecting an appropriate resting condition in studies of α.