Department of Neurological Surgery, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York City, United States; Department of Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany; Centre for Cognition and Decision Making, Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russian Federation
Niko A Busch
Institute of Psychology, University of Münster, Münster, Germany; Otto Creutzfeldt Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Münster, Münster, Germany
Annamaria Laudini
Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Department of Neurological Surgery, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York City, United States; Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands
Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, United States
Arno Villringer
Department of Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany; Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Vadim V Nikulin
Department of Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany; Centre for Cognition and Decision Making, Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russian Federation; Department of Neurology, Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany; Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Berlin, Germany
Spontaneous fluctuations of neural activity may explain why sensory responses vary across repeated presentations of the same physical stimulus. To test this hypothesis, we recorded electroencephalography in humans during stimulation with identical visual stimuli and analyzed how prestimulus neural oscillations modulate different stages of sensory processing reflected by distinct components of the event-related potential (ERP). We found that strong prestimulus alpha- and beta-band power resulted in a suppression of early ERP components (C1 and N150) and in an amplification of late components (after 0.4 s), even after controlling for fluctuations in 1/f aperiodic signal and sleepiness. Whereas functional inhibition of sensory processing underlies the reduction of early ERP responses, we found that the modulation of non-zero-mean oscillations (baseline shift) accounted for the amplification of late responses. Distinguishing between these two mechanisms is crucial for understanding how internal brain states modulate the processing of incoming sensory information.
