Tag: sensory selection

Psy­chophys­i­cal tar­get detec­tion has been shown to be mod­u­lat­ed by slow oscil­la­to­ry brain phase. How­ev­er, thus far, only low-lev­el sen­so­ry stim­uli have been used as tar­gets. The cur­rent human elec­troen­cephalog­ra­phy (EEG) study exam­ined the influ­ence of neur­al oscil­la­to­ry phase on a lex­i­cal-deci­sion task per­formed for stim­uli embed­ded in noise. Neur­al phase angles were com­pared for cor­rect ver­sus incor­rect lex­i­cal deci­sions using a phase bifur­ca­tion index (BI), which quan­ti­fies dif­fer­ences in mean phase angles and phase con­cen­tra­tions between cor­rect and incor­rect tri­als. Neur­al phase angles in the alpha fre­quen­cy range (8–12 Hz) over right ante­ri­or sen­sors were approx­i­mate­ly antiphase in a pres­tim­u­lus time win­dow, and thus suc­cess­ful­ly dis­tin­guished between cor­rect and incor­rect lex­i­cal deci­sions. More­over, alpha-band oscil­la­tions were again approx­i­mate­ly antiphase across par­tic­i­pants for cor­rect ver­sus incor­rect tri­als dur­ing a lat­er peri­s­tim­u­lus time win­dow (∼500 ms) at left-cen­tral elec­trodes. Strik­ing­ly, lex­i­cal deci­sion accu­ra­cy was not pre­dict­ed by either event-relat­ed poten­tials (ERPs) or oscil­la­to­ry pow­er mea­sures. We sug­gest that cor­rect lex­i­cal deci­sions depend both on suc­cess­ful sen­so­ry pro­cess­ing, which is made pos­si­ble by the align­ment of stim­u­lus onset with an opti­mal alpha phase, as well as inte­gra­tion and weight­ing of deci­sion­al infor­ma­tion, which is cou­pled to alpha phase imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing the crit­i­cal manip­u­la­tion that dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed words from pseu­do­words. The cur­rent study con­sti­tutes a first step toward char­ac­ter­iz­ing the role of dynam­ic oscil­la­to­ry brain states for high­er cog­ni­tive func­tions, such as spo­ken word recognition.