Abstract
SummaryLow-frequency oscillations are proposed to be involved in separating neuronal representations belonging to different items. Although item-specific neuronal activity was found to cluster on different oscillatory phases, the influence of this mechanism on perception is unknown. Here, we investigated the perceptual consequences of neuronal item separation through oscillatory clustering. In an electroencephalographic experiment, participants categorized sounds parametrically varying in pitch, relative to an arbitrary pitch boundary. Pre-stimulus theta and alpha phase biased near-boundary sound categorization to one category or the other. Phase also modulated whether evoked neuronal responses contributed stronger to the fit of the sound envelope of one or another category. Intriguingly, participants with stronger oscillatory clustering (phase strongly biasing sound categorization) in the theta, but not alpha, range had steeper perceptual psychometric slopes (sharper sound category discrimination). These results indicate that neuronal sorting by phase directly influences subsequent perception and has a positive impact on discrimination performance.
Highlights
Many everyday tasks require the online tracking of various types of information
We need to keep track of a shopping list or of the voice identities of multiple speakers in a room. This type of tracking demands the active maintenance of different item or location representations and requires these item representations to be strictly separated such that the representations do not entangle
Our interest for this study was to investigate if single-trial perceptual and neuronal outcomes are influenced by oscillatory phase, as well as to investigate if phase separation strength influences overall perceptual discrimination
Summary
Many everyday tasks require the online tracking of various types of information. For example, we need to keep track of a shopping list or of the voice identities of multiple speakers in a room. Gamma power has been shown to cluster on unique low-frequency phases (Heusser et al, 2016; Canolty et al, 2006; Lakatos et al, 2005) This suggests that within one fluctuation, known as cycle, different types of information, and different item representations, might be represented at distinct phases (O’Keefe and Recce, 1993; Lisman, 2005; Lisman and Idiart, 1995). Letter-selective electrocorticography (EcoG) channels displayed high gamma activity at different theta phases dependent on the serial position of the letter Combined, these studies suggest that different items are represented by the clustering of information to different low-frequency oscillatory phases
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