Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
6024310 | NeuroImage | 2016 | 11 Pages |
â¢Slow neural oscillations act to gate influences of temporal expectation on perception.â¢Alpha oscillations in auditory cortex affect auditory perception.â¢Auditory alpha-band influences on perception depend on delta-band amplitude.
Alignment of neural oscillations with temporally regular input allows listeners to generate temporal expectations. However, it remains unclear how behavior is governed in the context of temporal variability: What role do temporal expectations play, and how do they interact with the strength of neural oscillatory activity? Here, human participants detected near-threshold targets in temporally variable acoustic sequences. Temporal expectation strength was estimated using an oscillator model and pre-target neural amplitudes in auditory cortex were extracted from magnetoencephalography signals. Temporal expectations modulated target-detection performance, however, only when neural delta-band amplitudes were large. Thus, slow neural oscillations act to gate influences of temporal expectation on perception. Furthermore, slow amplitude fluctuations governed linear and quadratic influences of auditory alpha-band activity on performance. By fusing a model of temporal expectation with neural oscillatory dynamics, the current findings show that human perception in temporally variable contexts relies on complex interactions between multiple neural frequency bands.