Spontaneous slow cortical potentials and brain oscillations independently influence conscious visual perception

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science
• Perception Research

Background:

• Conscious perception arises from sensory input interacting with spontaneous brain activity.
• Pre-stimulus brain activity, including alpha/beta oscillations and slow cortical potentials (SCPs), influences perception.
• The independent or shared mechanisms underlying these influences are not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether brain oscillations and SCPs independently or dependently influence conscious perception.
• To explore the relationship between oscillatory power, SCPs, and pupil-linked arousal in visual perception.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of two independent magnetoencephalography (MEG) datasets.
• Utilized near-threshold visual perception tasks with both low-level (Gabor patches) and high-level (objects, faces, houses, animals) stimuli.
• Employed mediation analysis to examine relationships between neural activity, arousal, and perception.

Main Results:

• Oscillatory power and large-scale SCP activity influence conscious perception via independent mechanisms with no shared variance.
• Pre-stimulus oscillatory power and SCP activity show distinct relationships with pupil size (arousal index).

Conclusions:

• Brain oscillations and SCPs are independent contributors to perceptual awareness.
• These distinct neural processes have separate links to pupil-linked arousal, suggesting parallel pathways in conscious perception.