Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, Duke University, Durham, NC, 27708, USA.
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC, 27708, USA.
Sci Rep. 2022 Dec 22;12(1):22126. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-25720-2.
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.
我们研究了前刺激α波段振荡活动和刺激引发的循环处理是否相互作用，以促进意识视觉感知。参与者试图感知通过物体替代掩蔽（OSM）而在感知上被掩蔽的视觉刺激。我们表明，减弱的前刺激α功率与更大的负极性刺激诱发的 ERP 活动相关，该活动类似于先前认为反映与意识感知相关的循环处理的视觉意识负性（VAN）。然而，这种效果与更好的感知无关。相反，当前刺激α功率升高时，与首选的前刺激α阶段相关的 VAN 样负性更大，这与更好的线索感知相关。当前刺激α功率升高但刺激发生在非最佳前刺激α阶段且 VAN 样负性较低时，线索感知会更差。我们的发现表明，特定相位的前刺激α活动可实现时间选择性的循环处理，从而促进 OSM 中的意识感知。
