Cortical entrainment to hierarchical contextual rhythms recomposes dynamic attending in visual perception
Open Access
- 4 June 2021
- journal article
- research article
- Published by eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd in eLife
Abstract
Temporal regularity is ubiquitous and essential to guiding attention and coordinating behavior within a dynamic environment. Previous researchers have modeled attention as an internal rhythm that may entrain to first-order regularity from rhythmic events to prioritize information selection at specific time points. Using the attentional blink paradigm, here we show that higher-order regularity based on rhythmic organization of contextual features (pitch, color, or motion) may serve as a temporal frame to recompose the dynamic profile of visual temporal attention. Critically, such attentional reframing effect is well predicted by cortical entrainment to the higher-order contextual structure at the delta band as well as its coupling with the stimulus-driven alpha power. These results suggest that the human brain involuntarily exploits multiscale regularities in rhythmic contexts to recompose dynamic attending in visual perception, and highlight neural entrainment as a central mechanism for optimizing our conscious experience of the world in the time dimension.Funding Information
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (31830037)
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (31771211)
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB32010300)
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (2018116)
- Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China (2020AAA0105600)
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