TY - JOUR
T1 - Neural Mechanisms of Attentional Control for Objects
T2 - Decoding EEG Alpha When Anticipating Faces, Scenes, and Tools
AU - Noah, Sean
AU - Powell, Travis
AU - Khodayari, Natalia
AU - Olivan, Diana
AU - Ding, Mingzhou
AU - Mangun, George R.
PY - 2020/6/17
Y1 - 2020/6/17
N2 - Attentional selection mechanisms in visual cortex involve changes in oscillatory activity in the EEG alpha band (8–12 Hz), with decreased alpha indicating focal cortical enhancement and increased alpha indicating suppression. This has been observed for spatial selective attention and attention to stimulus features such as color versus motion. We investigated whether attention to objects involves similar alpha-mediated changes in focal cortical excitability. In experiment 1, 20 volunteers (8 males; 12 females) were cued (80% predictive) on a trial-by-trial basis to different objects (faces, scenes, or tools). Support vector machine decoding of alpha power patterns revealed that late (.500 ms latency) in the cue-to-target foreperiod, only EEG alpha differed with the to-be-attended object category. In experiment 2, to eliminate the possibility that decoding of the physical features of cues led to our results, 25 participants (9 males; 16 females) performed a similar task where cues were nonpredictive of the object category. Alpha decoding was now only significant in the early (,200 ms) foreperiod. In experiment 3, to eliminate the possibility that task set differences between the different object categories led to our experiment 1 results, 12 participants (5 males; 7 females) performed a predictive cuing task where the discrimination task for different objects was identical across object categories. The results replicated experiment 1. Together, these findings support the hypothesis that the neural mechanisms of visual selective attention involve focal cortical changes in alpha power not only for simple spatial and feature attention, but also for high-level object attention in humans.
AB - Attentional selection mechanisms in visual cortex involve changes in oscillatory activity in the EEG alpha band (8–12 Hz), with decreased alpha indicating focal cortical enhancement and increased alpha indicating suppression. This has been observed for spatial selective attention and attention to stimulus features such as color versus motion. We investigated whether attention to objects involves similar alpha-mediated changes in focal cortical excitability. In experiment 1, 20 volunteers (8 males; 12 females) were cued (80% predictive) on a trial-by-trial basis to different objects (faces, scenes, or tools). Support vector machine decoding of alpha power patterns revealed that late (.500 ms latency) in the cue-to-target foreperiod, only EEG alpha differed with the to-be-attended object category. In experiment 2, to eliminate the possibility that decoding of the physical features of cues led to our results, 25 participants (9 males; 16 females) performed a similar task where cues were nonpredictive of the object category. Alpha decoding was now only significant in the early (,200 ms) foreperiod. In experiment 3, to eliminate the possibility that task set differences between the different object categories led to our experiment 1 results, 12 participants (5 males; 7 females) performed a predictive cuing task where the discrimination task for different objects was identical across object categories. The results replicated experiment 1. Together, these findings support the hypothesis that the neural mechanisms of visual selective attention involve focal cortical changes in alpha power not only for simple spatial and feature attention, but also for high-level object attention in humans.
KW - Alpha
KW - Attention
KW - Decoding
KW - EEG
KW - Objects
KW - Vision
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85086748218&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85086748218&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2685-19.2020
DO - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2685-19.2020
M3 - Article
C2 - 32404346
AN - SCOPUS:85086748218
VL - 40
SP - 4913
EP - 4924
JO - Journal of Neuroscience
JF - Journal of Neuroscience
SN - 0270-6474
IS - 25
ER -