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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on April 18, 2008
Cerebral Cortex 2008 18(12):2902-2908; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhn049
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Selective Attention Increases the Dependency of Cortical Responses on Visual Motion Coherence in Man

Barbara Händel1,2, Werner Lutzenberger3, Peter Thier2 and Thomas Haarmeier1,2

1 Department of General Neurology, 2 Department of Cognitive Neurology, Hertie-Institute for Clinical Brain Research, 3 Institute of Medical Psychology and Behavioural Neurobiology, University of Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany

Address correspondence to Dr Thomas Haarmeier, Department of Cognitive Neurology, Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research, Klinikum Schnarrenberg, Hoppe-Seyler-Straße 3, 72076 Tübingen, Germany. Email: thomas.haarmeier{at}uni-tuebingen.de.

Attention improves visual discrimination and consequently allows to discern stimuli with low signal-to-noise ratios that otherwise would remain undetected. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to test whether neuromagnetic responses recorded from occipito-temporal cortex, reflecting the size of visual motion signals embedded in noise (motion coherence), would mirror the perceptual changes induced by attention. Attention directed to a given hemifield increased and decreased the coherence modulation of the MEG response over contralateral and ipsilateral visual cortex, respectively, indicating a change in the neuronal signal-to-noise ratio at the population level.

Key Words: delta oscillations • magnetoencephalography • signal-to-noise ratio • visual motion perception


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