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Spontaneous EEG Activity and Biases in Perception of Supra-Threshold Stimuli

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Advances in Cognitive Neurodynamics (III)

Abstract

Human perception of oriented visual stimuli is biased: some orientations are seen more often than others. We studied how the orientation bias is represented in the electrical brain activity that preceded presentation of ambiguous supra-threshold visual stimuli. We examined scalp EEG over the parieto-occipital regions during 1 sec before stimulus presentation. The alpha activity of pre-stimulus EEG was associated with the orientation bias: the preference for vertical orientation in most observers corresponded to low pre-stimulus alpha power. The results indicate that the orientation bias is encoded in intrinsic properties of ongoing cortical dynamics, forming spontaneous orientation-specific patterns of activity.

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Correspondence to Andrey R. Nikolaev .

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Nikolaev, A.R., Gepshtein, S., van Leeuwen, C. (2013). Spontaneous EEG Activity and Biases in Perception of Supra-Threshold Stimuli. In: Yamaguchi, Y. (eds) Advances in Cognitive Neurodynamics (III). Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4792-0_39

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