Effect of sustained selective attention on steady-state visual evoked potentials

Visual-spatial selective attention enhances the processing of task-relevant visual events while suppressing the processing of irrelevant ones. In this study, we employed a frequency-tagging paradigm to investigate how sustained visual-spatial attention modulates the first harmonic and second harmonic steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs). Unlike previous studies, that investigated stimulation durations of 10 s or less, we tested a 30-s period. SSVEPs were elicited by simultaneously presenting to the right and left visual hemifields two pattern reversal checkerboard stimuli modulating at 7.14 Hz and 11.11 Hz. Participants were cued to selectively attend to one visual hemifield while ignoring the other. Behavioral results indicated that participants selectively attended to the cued visual hemifield. When participants attended to the visual stimuli, there were larger second harmonic SSVEPs but no attentional modulation of first harmonics. The results are consistent with the proposal that neural populations underlying first, and second harmonics have distinct functional roles, i.e., first harmonics' mechanisms preserve stimulus properties and are resistant to attentional gain, whereas second harmonics mediate attentional modulation. This interpretation is supported by a gain control theory of selective attention.