Clarifying frequency-dependent brightness enhancement: delta- and theta-band flicker, not alpha-band flicker,...

Frequency-dependent brightness enhancement, a perceptual illusion in which a flickering light can appear twice as bright as a constant light, has historically been reported to produce maximum effects at a flicker rate within the alpha (8-12 Hz) band (Bartley in J Exp Psychol 23(3):313-319, 1938). Our recent examinations of this phenomenon using brightness discrimination between two flickering stimuli, however, have instead revealed the brightest percepts from theta-band (4-7 Hz) flicker (Bertrand et al. in Sci Rep 8(1):6152, 2018). Two primary questions arise from these seemingly contradictory findings: first, could task differences between these studies have caused recruitment of discrete oscillatory processes? Second, could the reported theta-band flicker enhancement be the result of an aliased alpha rhythm, sequentially sampling two stimulus locations, resulting in an ~ 5 Hz half-alpha rhythm? Here, we investigated these questions with two experiments: one replicating Bartley's (1938) adjustment paradigm, and one containing both Bartley's adjustment task and Bertrand's (2018) discrimination task, but presenting stimuli only sequentially (rather than concurrently). Examination of a range of frequencies (2-12 Hz) revealed the greatest brightness enhancement arising from flicker in the delta- and theta-band across all conditions, regardless of the spatial or temporal configuration of the stimuli. We speculate that these slower rhythms play an integral role in complex visual operations (e.g., a discrimination decision) where the entrainment of the endogenous neural rhythm to matched exogenous rhythmic stimulation promotes more efficient processing of visual information and thus produces perceptual biases as seen in frequency-dependent brightness enhancement.