Prestimulus oscillations predict visual perception performance between and within subjects
Section snippets
Subjects
Thirty-five subjects participated in the experiment. Five subjects were excluded, either because their EEG was heavily contaminated by movement artefacts, or because their performance was significantly below chance level (< 17%; p < 0.01), indicating that they did not follow task instruction. From the remaining 30 subjects (21 females; mean age: 23.07; range: 20 to 36), 26 were right-handed. All subjects gave written informed consent, had normal or corrected to normal vision, and reported no
Between-subjects analysis
Mean detection rate in the perception task was 42% with high variability ranging from performance at chance level (around 25%) to nearly perfect performance (90%). Perceivers showed a mean detection rate of 58% and Non-Perceivers showed a mean detection rate of 26%, which is around chance level. Analysis of power in the range of 4 to 70 Hz revealed that Perceivers showed significantly less pre-stimulus alpha power (8 to 12 Hz) than Non-Perceivers (Z = − 2.261; p < 0.05). No significant effects were
Discussion
The main findings of this study are that ongoing alpha, beta, and gamma oscillations predict perception performance between and within subjects. Different measures of these oscillations were related to perception performance, though in different ways. Whereas alpha power distinguished between subjects who were able to perceive the stimulus and the subjects who were not, alpha, beta, and gamma phase coupling was capable to predict perception performance within subjects on a single trial basis.
A
Acknowledgments
The research presented here was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) awarded to Karl-Heinz Bäuml, Christoph Herrmann, and Wolfgang Klimesch (FOR-448). The authors would like to thank Claus Arnold, Christof Kuhbandner, Bernhard Pastötter, Bernhard Spitzer, and Maria Wimber for helpful suggestions. The authors also thank Anna-Sofie Kunz and Verena Bauer for data acquisition.
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