Selective deployment of attention to time and modality and its impact upon behavior and brain oscillations

This thesis investigates the relationship between attention to time and modality at the levels of behavior and pre-stimulus brain oscillations, measured with EEG. Participants were presented with target stimuli from one of two possible modalities, which could appear at one of two different time poin...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Mühlberg, Stefanie
Tipo de recurso: tesis doctoral
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2016
País:España
Institución:CBUC, CESCA
Repositorio:TDR. Tesis Doctorales en Red
OAI Identifier:oai:www.tdx.cat:10803/392142
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10803/392142
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Attention
Time
Cross-modal
Oscillations
Behavior
Atenció
Temps
Modalitat encreuada
Oscil·lacions
Conducta
616.8
Descripción
Sumario:This thesis investigates the relationship between attention to time and modality at the levels of behavior and pre-stimulus brain oscillations, measured with EEG. Participants were presented with target stimuli from one of two possible modalities, which could appear at one of two different time points. The factors time and modality were interlaced with each other by the fact that each of the modalities was more likely to appear at a different point in time and additionally one of the modalities being more likely overall. We observed that attention to each modality followed its respective temporal likelihood, independently which combination of modalities was used, suggesting a general mechanism for cross-modal temporal decoupling in time. This result is in contrast with cross-modal attention in space, which occurs in a coupled way. At the physiological level, the decoupling effect in time also seems to modulate ongoing neural oscillations in different frequency bands. Based on the results obtained in the time-frequency analysis, we put forward the following tentative hypotheses: alpha oscillations appear to encode switches in modality expectation over sensory cortices, while the beta band might encode the expected modality of the next upcoming stimulus and for the effect of temporal attention itself.