Biology subjects

Benwell, C. S.

Publications and source records attributed to Benwell, C. S..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2018

Subjective perceptual experience tracks the neural signature of sensory evidence accumulation during decision formation

How neural representations of low-level visual information are accessed by higher-order processes to inform decisions and give rise to conscious experience is a longstanding question. Research on perceptual decision making has revealed a late event-related EEG potential (the Centro-Parietal Positivity, CPP) to be a correlate of the accumulation of sensory evidence. We tested to what extent this evidence accumulation signal is driven by externally presented (physical) versus internally experienced (subjective) sensory evidence. The results show that the known relationship between external evidence and the evidence accumulation signal (reflected in the CPP amplitude) is mediated by the level of subjective awareness. Additionally, the CPP closely tracks the subjective perceptual evidence during both correct and incorrect trials. Hence, a remarkably close relationship exists between the evidence accumulation process (i.e. CPP) and subjective perceptual experience, suggesting that neural decision processes and components of conscious experience are tightly linked.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

Stimulus-driven brain rhythms within the alpha band: The attentional-modulation conundrum

Two largely independent research lines use rhythmic sensory stimulation to study visual processing. Despite the use of strikingly similar experimental paradigms, they differ crucially in their notion of the stimulus-driven periodic brain responses: One regards them mostly as synchronised (entrained) intrinsic brain rhythms; the other assumes they are predominantly evoked responses (classically termed steady-state responses, or SSRs) that add to the ongoing brain activity. This conceptual difference can produce contradictory predictions about, and interpretations of, experimental outcomes. The effect of spatial attention on brain rhythms in the alpha-band (8 - 13 Hz) is one such instance: alpha-range SSRs have typically been found to increase in power when participants focus their spatial attention on laterally presented stimuli, in line with a gain control of the visual evoked response. In nearly identical experiments, retinotopic decreases in entrained alpha-band power have been reported, in line with the inhibitory function of intrinsic alpha. Here we reconcile these contradictory findings by showing that they result from a small but far-reaching difference between two common approaches to EEG spectral decomposition. In a new analysis of previously published human EEG data, recorded during bilateral rhythmic visual stimulation, we find the typical SSR gain effect when emphasising stimulus-locked neural activity and the typical retinotopic alpha suppression when focusing on ongoing rhythms. These opposite but parallel effects suggest that spatial attention may bias the neural processing of dynamic visual stimulation via two complementary neural mechanisms.\n\nSIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTAttending to a visual stimulus strengthens its representation in visual cortex and leads to a retinotopic suppression of spontaneous alpha rhythms. To further investigate this process, researchers often attempt to phase-lock, or entrain, alpha through rhythmic visual stimulation under the assumption that this entrained alpha retains the characteristics of spontaneous alpha. Instead, we show that the part of the brain response that is phase-locked to the visual stimulation increased with attention (in line with steady-state evoked potentials), while the typical suppression was only present in non-stimulus-locked alpha activity. The opposite signs of these effects suggest that attentional modulation of dynamic visual stimulation relies on two parallel cortical mechanisms - retinotopic alpha suppression and increased temporal tracking.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

Frequency and power of human alpha oscillations drift systematically and independently with time-on-task

Oscillatory neural activity is a fundamental characteristic of the mammalian brain spanning multiple levels of spatial and temporal scale. Current theories of neural oscillations and analysis techniques employed to investigate their functional significance are based on an often implicit assumption: In the absence of experimental manipulation, the spectral content of any given EEG- or MEG-recorded neural oscillator remains approximately stationary over the course of a typical experimental session (~1 hour), spontaneously fluctuating only around its dominant frequency. Here, we examined this assumption for ongoing neural oscillations in the alpha-band (8:13 Hz). We found that alpha peak frequency systematically decreased over time, while alpha-power increased. Intriguingly, these systematic changes showed partial independence of each other: Statistical source separation (independent component analysis) revealed that while some alpha components displayed concomitant power increases and peak frequency decreases, other components showed either unique power increases or frequency decreases. Interestingly, we also found these components to differ in frequency. Components that showed mixed frequency/power changes oscillated primarily in the lower alpha-band (~8-10Hz), while components with unique changes oscillated primarily in the higher alpha-band (~9-13Hz). Our findings provide novel clues on the time-varying intrinsic properties of large-scale neural networks as measured by M/EEG, with implications for the analysis and interpretation of studies that aim at identifying functionally relevant oscillatory networks or at driving them through external stimulation.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2017

No changes in parieto-occipital alpha during neural phase locking to visual quasi-periodic theta-, alpha-, and beta-band stimulation

Recent studies have probed the role of the parieto-occipital alpha rhythm (8 - 12 Hz) in human visual perception through attempts to drive its neural generators. To that end, paradigms have used high-intensity strictly-periodic visual stimulation that created strong predictions about future stimulus occurrences and repeatedly demonstrated perceptual consequences in line with an entrainment of parieto-occipital alpha. Our study, in turn, examined the case of alpha entrainment by non-predictive low-intensity quasi-periodic visual stimulation within theta-(4 - 7 Hz), alpha-(8 - 13 Hz) and beta (14 - 20 Hz) frequency bands, i.e. a class of stimuli that resemble the temporal characteristics of naturally occurring visual input more closely. We have previously reported substantial neural phase-locking in EEG recording during all three stimulation conditions. Here, we studied to what extent this phase-locking reflected an entrainment of intrinsic alpha rhythms in the same dataset. Specifically, we tested whether quasi-periodic visual stimulation affected several properties of parieto-occipital alpha generators. Speaking against an entrainment of intrinsic alpha rhythms by non-predictive low-intensity quasi-periodic visual stimulation, we found none of these properties to show differences between stimulation frequency bands. In particular, alpha band generators did not show increased sensitivity to alpha band stimulation and Bayesian inference corroborated evidence against an influence of stimulation frequency. Our results set boundary conditions for when and how to expect effects of entrainment of alpha generators and suggest that the parieto-occipital alpha rhythm may be more inert to external influences than previously thought.

neuroscience↗