Journal
JOURNAL OF NEUROPHYSIOLOGY
Volume 105, Issue 3, Pages 1318-1326Publisher
AMER PHYSIOLOGICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1152/jn.00653.2010
Keywords
beta; electroencephalography; spatial certainty
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Funding
- Wellcome Trust
- MRC [G0802146] Funding Source: UKRI
- Medical Research Council [G0802146] Funding Source: researchfish
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Gould IC, Rushworth MF, Nobre AC. Indexing the graded allocation of visuospatial attention using anticipatory alpha oscillations. J Neurophysiol 105: 1318-1326, 2011. First published January 12, 2011; doi:10.1152/jn.00653.2010.-Lateralization in the desynchronization of anticipatory occipitoparietal alpha (8-12 Hz) oscillations has been implicated in the allocation of selective visuospatial attention. Previous studies have demonstrated that small changes in the lateralization of alpha-band activity are predictive of behavioral performance but have not directly investigated how flexibly alpha lateralization is linked to top-down attentional goals. To address this question, we presented participants with cues providing varying degrees of spatial certainty about the location at which a target would appear. Time-frequency analysis of EEG data demonstrated that manipulating spatial certainty led to graded changes in the extent to which alpha oscillations were lateralized over the occipitoparietal cortex during the cue-target interval. We found that individual differences in alpha desynchronization contralateral to attention predicted reaction times, event-related potential measures of perceptual processing of targets, and beta-band (15-25 Hz) activity typically associated with response preparation. These results support the hypothesis that anticipatory alpha modulation is a plausible neural mechanism underlying the allocation of visuospatial attention and is under flexible top-down control.
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