Effect of repetition on the behavioral and neuronal responses to ambiguous Necker cube images

Vladimir Maksimenko,Alexander Kuc,Semen Kurkin,Alexander Hramov,Nikita Frolov

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-82688-1

Vladimir Maksimenko, Alexander Kuc + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-82688-1

Copy DOI

Abstract

A repeated presentation of an item facilitates its subsequent detection or identification, a phenomenon of priming. Priming may involve different types of memory and attention and affects neural activity in various brain regions. Here we instructed participants to report on the orientation of repeatedly presented Necker cubes with high (HA) and low (LA) ambiguity. Manipulating the contrast of internal edges, we varied the ambiguity and orientation of the cube. We tested how both the repeated orientation (referred to as a stimulus factor) and the repeated ambiguity (referred to as a top-down factor) modulated neuronal and behavioral response. On the behavioral level, we observed higher speed and correctness of the response to the HA stimulus following the HA stimulus and a faster response to the right-oriented LA stimulus following the right-oriented stimulus. On the neuronal level, the prestimulus theta-band power grew for the repeated HA stimulus, indicating activation of the neural networks related to attention and uncertainty processing. The repeated HA stimulus enhanced hippocampal activation after stimulus onset. The right-oriented LA stimulus following the right-oriented stimulus enhanced activity in the precuneus and the left frontal gyri before the behavioral response. During the repeated HA stimulus processing, enhanced hippocampal activation may evidence retrieving information to disambiguate the stimulus and define its orientation. Increased activation of the precuneus and the left prefrontal cortex before responding to the right-oriented LA stimulus following the right-oriented stimulus may indicate a match between their orientations. Finally, we observed increased hippocampal activation after responding to the stimuli, reflecting the encoding stimulus features in memory. In line with the large body of works relating the hippocampal activity with episodic memory, we suppose that this type of memory may subserve the priming effect during the repeated presentation of ambiguous images.

Highlights

A repeated presentation of an item facilitates its subsequent detection or identification, a phenomenon of priming
To minimize between-subject variability, we considered normalized wavelet power (NWP) by contrasting WP on all trials to the WP averaged over 40-s baseline EEG before the experiment: NWP = (WP − WPbaseline)/WPbaseline
Behavioral analysis indicated that the previous stimulus affected the current stimulus processing in two cases: i) subjects responded faster to the HA stimuli following the HA stimuli; ii) subjects responded faster to the right-oriented LA stimuli following the right-oriented stimuli

Summary

Introduction

A repeated presentation of an item facilitates its subsequent detection or identification, a phenomenon of priming. Increased activation of the precuneus and the left prefrontal cortex before responding to the right-oriented LA stimulus following the right-oriented stimulus may indicate a match between the orientations at the higher processing levels. A significant interaction effect of the current stimulus ambiguity and orientation on the RT (Table 1) suggested that the RT might differ between the left- and right-oriented stimuli depending on their ambiguity.

Results

Conclusion