Rhythmic presentation of category-specific but different stimuli drives oscillatory brain response C Keitel, K Saupe, E Schröger, M Müller |
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Institute for Psychology, University of Leipzig, Germany
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| Rhythmic visual stimulation at a given rate elicits oscillatory brain activity with the same temporal frequency. We investigated whether this so-called steady-state response (SSR) can also be driven by a regular presentation of different stimuli that belong to a common symbolic category. To this end participants viewed a 15-Hz rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of letters (L), numbers (N) and unfamiliar symbols (U). Numbers or letters were presented at each third position, i.e. at 5 Hz in the RSVP stream, respectively. Symbols of the remaining two categories were interspersed in random order (Example sequence: …UL[N]LU[N]LU[N]…). Participants were cued to attend to letters or numbers and to report occurrences of color-tagged symbols of the cued category. Regular presentation of either category drove a robust 5-Hz SSR whose amplitude modulated with task-relevance of the driving symbols. Source reconstruction revealed distinct cortical origins of the category-specific 5-Hz SSR and the 15-Hz SSR driven by the RSVP. Hence, the 5-Hz SSR may demonstrate the ability of the human brain to entrain to a more abstract regularity beyond physical stimulus repetition. |
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