Rhythmic Influence of Top–Down Perceptual Priors in the Phase of Prestimulus Occipital Alpha Oscillations
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience April 15, 2016 Maxine T. Sherman, Ryota Kanai, Anil K. Seth et al. 134 citations
Spontaneous alpha-band neural oscillations in the brain periodically transmit prior expectations to the visual cortex, biasing both objective decisions and subjective confidence before a stimulus appears. In a detection task with scalp EEG, prestimulus occipital alpha phase predicted the weighting of expectations on yes/no decisions and on confidence judgments, independent of attention. These findings suggest that alpha oscillations change the baseline from which evidence accumulation begins, shaping early visual processing and informing how expectations influence perception at the neural level.