Phasic modulation of visual representations during sustained attention.

ABSTRACT: 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 us

SUBMITTER: van Es MWJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9543919 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature