Task demands modulate pre-stimulus alpha frequency and sensory template during bistable apparent motion perception

Despite ambiguous environmental inputs, top-down attention biases our subjective perception toward the preferred percepts, via modulating prestimulus neural activity or inducing prestimulus sensory templates that carry concrete internal sensory representations of the preferred percepts. In contrast to frequent changes of behavioral goals in the typical cue-target paradigm, human beings are often engaged in a prolonged task state with only 1 specific behavioral goal. It remains unclear how prestimulus neural signals and sensory templates are modulated in the latter case. To answer this question in the present electroencephalogram study on human subjects, we manipulated sustained task demands toward one of the 2 possible percepts in the bistable Ternus display, emphasizing either temporal integration or segregation. First, the prestimulus peak alpha frequency, which gated the temporal window of temporal integration, was effectively modulated by task demands. Furthermore, time-resolved decoding analyses showed that task demands biased neural representations toward the preferred percepts after the full presentation of bottom-up stimuli. More importantly, sensory templates resembling the preferred percepts emerged even before the bottom-up sensory evidence were sufficient enough to induce explicit percepts. Taken together, task demands modulate both prestimulus alpha frequency and sensory templates, to eventually bias subjective perception toward the preferred percepts.