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The Obleser lab | Neural dynamics of communication

New paper in press: Alavash et al. in Net­work Neuroscience

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We are proud to pub­lish our recent study on how net­work dynam­ics of beta-band oscil­la­tions in the human brain medi­ate response speed in audi­to­ry per­cep­tu­al deci­sion-mak­ing. This work will appear soon in the first vol­ume of the promis­ing jour­nal Net­work Neu­ro­science.

Pre-print link http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/12/19/095356

Abstract
Per­cep­tu­al deci­sions vary in the speed at which we make them. Evi­dence sug­gests that trans­lat­ing sen­so­ry infor­ma­tion into behav­ioral deci­sions relies on dis­trib­uted inter­act­ing neur­al pop­u­la­tions, with deci­sion speed hing­ing on pow­er mod­u­la­tions of neur­al oscil­la­tions. Yet, the depen­dence of per­cep­tu­al deci­sions on the large-scale net­work orga­ni­za­tion of cou­pled neur­al oscil­la­tions has remained elu­sive. We mea­sured mag­ne­toen­cephalog­ra­phy sig­nals in human lis­ten­ers who judged acoustic stim­uli made of care­ful­ly titrat­ed clouds of tone sweeps. These stim­uli were used under two task con­texts where the par­tic­i­pants judged the over­all pitch or direc­tion of the tone sweeps. We traced the large-scale net­work dynam­ics of source-pro­ject­ed neur­al oscil­la­tions on a tri­al-by-tri­al basis using pow­er enve­lope cor­re­la­tions and graph-the­o­ret­i­cal net­work dis­cov­ery. Under both tasks, faster deci­sions were pre­dict­ed by high­er seg­re­ga­tion and low­er inte­gra­tion of cou­pled beta-band (~16–28 Hz) oscil­la­tions. We also uncov­ered brain net­work states that pro­mot­ed faster deci­sions and emerged from low­er-order audi­to­ry and high­er-order con­trol brain areas. Specif­i­cal­ly, deci­sion speed in judg­ing tone-sweep direc­tion crit­i­cal­ly relied on nodal net­work con­fig­u­ra­tions of ante­ri­or tem­po­ral, cin­gu­late and mid­dle frontal cor­tices. Our find­ings sug­gest that glob­al net­work com­mu­ni­ca­tion dur­ing per­cep­tu­al deci­sion-mak­ing is imple­ment­ed in the human brain by large-scale cou­plings between beta-band neur­al oscillations.
Relat­ed
  1. Strauß again — in Jour­nal of Neuroscience
  2. New paper in press: Her­rmann, Hen­ry, Grigutsch & Obleser, The Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science [Update]
  3. New paper in press in the Jour­nal of Neu­ro­science: Strauß, Hen­ry, Scharinger, & Obleser
  4. New paper in press: Her­rmann, Schlicht­ing, & Obleser, Jour­nal of Neuroscience