Dehaghani Narjes Soltani, Zarei Mojtaba
Institute of Medical Science and Technology, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.
Department of Neurology, Odense University Hospital, Odense, Denmark.
Brain Behav. 2025 Feb;15(2):e3654. doi: 10.1002/brb3.3654.
Humans obtain most of their information from visual stimuli. The perception of these stimuli may be modulated by the ongoing pre-stimulus brain activities. Depending on the task design, the processing of different cognitive functions such as spatial attention, feature-based attention, temporal attention, arousal, and mental imagery may start prior to the stimulus onset.
This process is typically accompanied by changes in pre-stimulus oscillatory activities including power, phase, or connectivity in different frequency bands. To explain the effect of these changes, several mechanisms have been proposed. In this article, we review these changes and the potential mechanisms in the context of the pre-stimulus enabled cognitive functions. We provide evidence both in favor of and against the most documented mechanisms and conclude that no single mechanism can solely delineate the effects of pre-stimulus brain activities on later processing. Instead, multiple mechanisms may work in tandem to guide pre-stimulus brain activities.
Additionally, our findings indicate that in many studies a combination of these cognitive functions begins prior to stimulus onset.
Thus, dissociating these cognitive functions is challenging based on the current literature, and the need for precise task designs in later studies to differentiate between them is crucial.
人类大部分信息来自视觉刺激。这些刺激的感知可能会受到刺激前大脑活动的调节。根据任务设计，不同认知功能（如空间注意力、基于特征的注意力、时间注意力、唤醒和心理意象）的处理可能在刺激开始之前就已启动。
这一过程通常伴随着刺激前振荡活动的变化，包括不同频段的功率、相位或连接性。为了解释这些变化的影响，人们提出了几种机制。在本文中，我们在刺激前启用的认知功能背景下回顾这些变化和潜在机制。我们提供了支持和反对最有文献记载机制的证据，并得出结论，没有单一机制能够单独描述刺激前大脑活动对后续处理的影响。相反，多种机制可能协同作用来引导刺激前大脑活动。
此外，我们的发现表明，在许多研究中，这些认知功能的组合在刺激开始之前就已开始。
因此，根据当前文献，区分这些认知功能具有挑战性，在后续研究中需要精确的任务设计来区分它们，这一点至关重要。
