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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on June 7, 2007
Cerebral Cortex 2008 18(2):386-396; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhm073
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Large-Scale Gamma-Band Phase Synchronization and Selective Attention

Sam M. Doesburg1, Alexa B. Roggeveen1, Keiichi Kitajo1,2 and Lawrence M. Ward1,3

1 Psychophysics and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver V6T 1Z4, Canada, 2 Laboratory for Dynamics of Emergent Intelligence, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Saitama 351-0198, Japan, 3 Brain Research Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver V6T 1Z4, Canada

Address correspondence to Sam M. Doesburg, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver BC V6T 1Z4, Email: sam{at}psych.ubc.ca.

Explaining the emergence of a coherent conscious percept and an intentional agent from the activity of distributed neurons is key to understanding how the brain produces higher cognitive processes. Gamma-band synchronization has been proposed to be a mechanism for the functional integration of neural populations that together form a transitory, large-scale, task- and/or percept-specific network. The operation of this mechanism in the context of attention orienting entails that cortical regions representing attended locations should show more gamma-band synchronization with other cortical areas than would those representing unattended locations. This increased synchronization should be apparent in the same time frame as that of the deployment of attention to a particular location. In order to observe this effect, we made electroencephalogram recordings while subjects attended to one side or the other of the visual field (which we confirmed by event-related potential analysis) and calculated phase-locking statistics between the signals recorded at relevant electrode pairs. We observed increased gamma-band phase synchronization between visual cortex contralateral to the attended location and other, widespread, cortical areas approximately 240–380 ms after the directional cue was presented, confirming the prediction of a large-scale gamma synchronous network oriented to the cued location.

Key Words: alpha • attention • EEG • gamma • neural synchrony


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