bioRxiv · 10.1101/229526
Gating by induced α-γ asynchrony in selective attention
Abstract
Visual selective attention operates through top-down mechanisms of signal enhancement and suppression, mediated by -band oscillations. The effects of such top-down signals on local processing in primary visual cortex (V1) remain poorly understood. In the present work, we characterize the interplay between large-scale interactions and local activity changes in V1 that orchestrates selective attention, using Granger-causality and phase-amplitude coupling (PAC) analysis of EEG source signals. The task required participants to either attend to or ignore oriented gratings. Results from time-varying, directed connectivity analysis revealed frequency specific effects of attentional selection: bottom-up {gamma}-band influences from visual areas increased rapidly in response to attended stimuli while distributed top-down -band influences originated from parietal cortex in response to ignored stimuli. Importantly, the results revealed a critical interplay between top-down parietal signals and -{gamma} PAC in visual areas. Parietal -band influences disrupted the -{gamma} coupling in visual cortex, which in turn reduced the amount of {gamma}-band outflow from visual areas. Our results are a first demonstration of how directed interactions affect cross-frequency coupling in downstream areas depending on task demands. These findings suggest that parietal cortex realizes selective attention by disrupting cross-frequency coupling at target regions, which prevents them from propagating task-irrelevant information.
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Pascucci, D., Hervais-Adelman, A., Michel, C., Plomp, G.. 2017-12-05. Gating by induced α-γ asynchrony in selective attention. https://doi.org/10.1101/229526
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