Abstract
The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is thought to orchestrate cognitive dynamics. However, in tests of bistable visual perception, no direct evidence supporting such presumable causal roles of the PFC has been reported except for a recent work. Here, using a novel brain-state-dependent neural stimulation system, we identified causal effects on percept dynamics in three PFC activities-right frontal eye fields, dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC), and inferior frontal cortex (IFC). The causality is behaviourally detectable only when we track brain state dynamics and modulate the PFC activity in brain-state-/state-history-dependent manners. The behavioural effects are underpinned by transient neural changes in the brain state dynamics, and such neural effects are quantitatively explainable by structural transformations of the hypothetical energy landscapes. Moreover, these findings indicate distinct functions of the three PFC areas: in particular, the DLPFC enhances the integration of two PFC-active brain states, whereas IFC promotes the functional segregation between them. This work resolves the controversy over the PFC roles in spontaneous perceptual switching and underlines brain state dynamics in fine investigations of brain-behaviour causality.
Highlights
Dynamic and flexible changes are among the fundamental key properties of human cognition and perception
As a preparation, we examined whether the current EEG system could capture qualitatively the same brain state dynamics as those found in our previous fMRI study employing the same SFM stimulus(Watanabe et al, 2014c)
Based on the model, we found that all the participants had almost the same energy landscape structure consisting of three major brain states: Frontal-area-dominantly-active state (F state), Visual-area105 dominantly-active state (V state) and Intermediate state (Int state) (e.g., Fig. 2b for Participant 1)
Summary
Dynamic and flexible changes are among the fundamental key properties of human cognition and perception. Theoretical work indicates that top-down signals from these PFC regions to the visual cortex are essential to perceptual inference (Hohwy et al, 2008; Weilnhammer et al, 2017). These studies indicate that inhibitory neural modulation of the PFC areas should induce behavioural changes in the bistable visual perception. Other studies claimed that the PFC activity is not essential to the emergence of multistable perception (Brascamp et al, 2015; Harrison and Tong, 2009) but mere a consequence of it (Block, 2020; Brascamp et al, 2015; Frässle et al, 2014; Knapen et al, 2011)
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