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Volume 17, Number 18, Issue of September 15, 1997 pp. 7141-7147
Copyright ©1997 Society for Neuroscience

Modulation of the Parieto-Occipital Alpha Rhythm during Object Detection

Received May 5, 1997; revised July 1, 1997; accepted July 2, 1997.

Simo Vanni¹, Antti Revonsuo², and Riitta Hari^{1, 3}

¹ Brain Research Unit, Low Temperature Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology, FIN-02015 HUT, Espoo, Finland, ² Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Turku, FIN-20014, Turku, Finland, and ³ Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Helsinki University Central Hospital, FIN-00290 Helsinki, Finland

Changes in the human neuromagnetic alpha rhythm were monitored during an object detection task to study the effects of visual shape processing on the parieto-occipital activity. Pictures of coherent meaningful objects, which the observers had to detect, and of disorganized meaningless non-objects were presented briefly between masks. The non-objects were systematically followed by a higher level of alpha than the objects, the difference emerging on average 400 msec after the stimulus, with a median delay of 130 msec after evoked response onsets in the occipital, temporal, and parietal cortices. Without attention to visual shape, the alpha levels did not differ between objects and non-objects. The alpha level was higher after non-objects than missed objects, and higher after missed than correctly detected objects, suggesting that the alpha level is inversely related to saliency or familiarity of the object and does not directly reflect visual awareness.

The reactive alpha rhythm was generated in the parieto-occipital sulcus, which in several primate species includes areas belonging to the dorsal visual pathway. According to current views, the parietal cortex produces attentional signals that filter out irrelevant information in the ventral visual stream. Our results reinforce the idea of bidirectional interaction: information derived from visual shape can rapidly modify activity in the parieto-occipital region. The synchronized alpha oscillations may reflect attenuation of occipito-parietal information transfer and disengagement of parietal cortex from object selection.

Key words: object recognition; attention; magnetoencephalography; brain rhythms; human; parieto-occipital sulcus; V6; V6A; PO; ventral visual stream; dorsal visual stream

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