Alpha Power Predicts Persistence of Bistable Perception

Giovanni Piantoni,Eus J W Van Someren,German Gomez-Herrero,Ysbrand D Van Der Werf,Nico Romeijn

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-05610-8

Abstract

Perception is strongly affected by the intrinsic state of the brain, which controls the propensity to either maintain a particular perceptual interpretation or switch to another. To understand the mechanisms underlying the spontaneous drive of the brain to explore alternative interpretations of unchanging stimuli, we repeatedly recorded high-density EEG after normal sleep and after sleep deprivation while participants observed a Necker cube image and reported the durations of the alternating representations of their bistable perception. We found that local alpha power around the parieto-occipital sulcus within the first second after the emergence of a perceptual representation predicted the fate of its duration. An experimentally induced increase in alpha power by means of sleep deprivation increased the average duration of individual representations. Taken together, these findings show that high alpha power promotes the stability of a perceptual representation and suppresses switching to the alternative. The observations support the hypothesis that synchronization of alpha oscillations across a wide neuronal network promotes the maintenance and stabilization of its current perceptual representation. Elevated alpha power could also be key to the poorly understood cognitive deficits, that typically accompany sleep deprivation, such as the loss of mental flexibility and lapses of responsiveness.

Highlights

An important feature of the perceptual system is its flexibility to process identical physical stimuli in different ways depending on the circumstances
The present study addresses the role of alpha oscillations in adjusting the flexibility of the brain to either maintain its current configuration of neuronal activity and the corresponding perceptual representation, or rather switch to a different one
In a bistable perception paradigm, higher alpha power correlates with longer duration of the individual perceptual representations

Summary

Introduction

An important feature of the perceptual system is its flexibility to process identical physical stimuli in different ways depending on the circumstances It enables, for example, the maintenance of attention to stimulus properties with expected reward and prevents interference from distracting aspects of the same stimulus. Spontaneous fluctuations in alpha power[13,14,15,16] have been shown to determine the subject’s ability and accuracy to process stimuli[17,18,19,20,21] These observations support the interpretation that alpha reflects a neural mechanism that regulates the amount of visual information that can be passed to higher-order areas, to conscious processing, and to the initiation of behavioral responses[11, 12, 22, 23]. The spontaneous alternations between the perceptual representations provide a unique opportunity to investigate how neuronal dynamics modulate perception without changing stimulus properties according to a specific cognitive paradigm[4, 26, 27]

Methods

Results

Conclusion