Human attention-guided visual perception is governed by rhythmic oscillations and aperiodic timescales
Fig 5
Neural timescales increase with cognitive demands.
(A) Schematic task design. Patients were instructed to search for a target triangle (“sample”, highlighted by dashed circle) of a given color and orientation. Once they identified the target triangle, they responded with a button press indicating whether its location was on the left or right half of the screen. (B) Reaction times during pop-out condition are shorter than during visual search condition (p < 0.0001). Individual dots correspond to trials. (C) Example of autocorrelation functions for each condition calculated on response-locked data. We hypothesized pop-out condition would show shorter timescales than the search condition. (D) Left: Grand-averaged response-locked neural timescales across frontal channels. Timescales in the period following search display onset (red dashed line) and after button press (black dashed line) decrease in pop-out condition relative to visual search condition returning to baseline around 1s (black bar represents significant time points p < 0.05). Right top: Topography of iEEG electrode placement in frontal ROI. Right bottom: Averaged timescales in the 500 ms period between search display onset and button press (gray shaded area) significantly differ between the conditions (p < 0.0001). The individual values for panel B and D are included in S2 Data, Experiment 5 sheet and S4 Data, respectively.