Cortical entrainment to hierarchical contextual rhythms recomposes dynamic attending in visual perception.

Peijun Yuan,Yi Jiang,Ying Wang,Ruichen Hu,Xue Zhang

doi:10.7554/elife.65118

Abstract

Temporal regularity is ubiquitous and essential to guiding attention and coordinating behavior within a dynamic environment. Previous researchers have modeled attention as an internal rhythm that may entrain to first-order regularity from rhythmic events to prioritize information selection at specific time points. Using the attentional blink paradigm, here we show that higher-order regularity based on rhythmic organization of contextual features (pitch, color, or motion) may serve as a temporal frame to recompose the dynamic profile of visual temporal attention. Critically, such attentional reframing effect is well predicted by cortical entrainment to the higher-order contextual structure at the delta band as well as its coupling with the stimulus-driven alpha power. These results suggest that the human brain involuntarily exploits multiscale regularities in rhythmic contexts to recompose dynamic attending in visual perception, and highlight neural entrainment as a central mechanism for optimizing our conscious experience of the world in the time dimension.

Highlights

Deploying attention over time is crucial for guiding human activities within a rapidly changing environment
Since the temporal structure of the contextual sounds was defined by periodic changes of pitch, when two targets were located in distinct cycles as in the between-cycle condition, they were accompanied by different tones, in contrast to that when located within the same cycle they were accompanied by the same tone
T2 was identified with similar accuracy across all the conditions in Experiment 1b, suggesting that it is the temporal structure of the contextual sounds, not the pitch difference at target presentation, that accounts for the between-cycle facilitation effect observed in Experiment 1a

Summary

Introduction

Deploying attention over time is crucial for guiding human activities within a rapidly changing environment. Jones and colleagues have shown in a series of studies that after listening to a rhythmic tone sequence, auditory perception in terms of pitch judgment and time discrimination was more accurate for target tones appearing at the expected than the unexpected time points (Jones et al, 2002; Large and Jones, 1999) Such facilitation effects have been extended to various aspects of visual perception and even across sensory modalities (Bolger et al, 2014; Brochard et al, 2013; Mathewson et al, 2010; Miller et al, 2013; ten Oever et al, 2014), implicating the involvement of a general attentional selection mechanism guided by the regularity in stimulus timing

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion