ArticleFrontiers in human neuroscience2016
Top-Down Control of Visual Alpha Oscillations: Sources of Control Signals and Their Mechanisms of Action.
Article in Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 68 papers.
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Who cites it
68 citing papers in PubMed.
- The impact of external and internal focus of attention on visual dependence and EEG alpha oscillations during postural control.Journal of neuroengineering and rehabilitation · 2022Trial
- Closed-Loop Neurofeedback of α Synchrony during Goal-Directed Attention.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2021Trial
- Effects of Age and Acute Moderate Alcohol Administration on Neurophysiology During Simulated Driving.Alcoholism, clinical and experimental research · 2016Trial
- Flexibility of internal attention: divergent spatiotemporal profiles for feature and object cueing.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Chronic pain and oscillatory neuroplasticity: Review on impaired compensatory network responses in resting-state electroencephalography.Brain network disorders · 2026Article
- Predicting big five personality traits from resting-state EEG connectivity: a connectome predictive modeling study.Brain structure & function · 2026Article
- The alpha rhythm: from physiology to behavior.Physiological reviews · 2026Review
- Age-related differences in alpha power for distractor inhibition during visual working memory.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Resting-state EEG alpha-BOLD coupling spatially follows cortical cell-type and receptor gradients.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Cortical alpha changes during visuospatial attention: a deep learning-enriched EEG analysis.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Spontaneous Modulation of Alpha Power During a Neurofeedback Session Without Instructions.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- The Ventral Attention Network Mediates Attentional Reorienting to Cross-Modal Expectancy Violations: Evidence from EEG and fMRI.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- Visual Neural Dynamics of Adolescents with Myopia During Face Inversion: An ERP and Oscillatory Study.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Musical Training and Perceptual History Shape Alpha Dynamics in Audiovisual Speech Integration.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Spatiotemporal dynamics of amygdala during implicit and explicit facial emotional recognition in major depressive disorder: An MEG study.Psychological medicine · 2025Article
- Spontaneous Modulation of Standard EEG Frequency Bands During a Neurofeedback-Like Task.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Transcranial 1064-nm laser photobiomodulation modulates frequency-specific cortical source dynamics and functional connectivity in healthy adults.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Cardiac-Sympathetic Contractility and Neural Alpha-Band Power: Cross-Modal Collaboration during Approach-Avoidance Conflict.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Conflicting Sensory Information Sharpens the Neural Representations of Early Selective Visuospatial Attention.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
8 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Alpha oscillations (8-12 Hz) are thought to inversely correlate with cortical excitability. Goal-oriented modulation of alpha has been studied extensively. In visual spatial attention, alpha over the region of visual cortex corresponding to the attended location decreases, signifying increased excitability to facilitate the processing of impending stimuli. In contrast, in retention of verbal working memory, alpha over visual cortex increases, signifying decreased excitability to gate out stimulus input to protect the information held online from sensory interference. According to the prevailing model, this goal-oriented biasing of sensory cortex is effected by top-down control signals from frontal and parietal cortices. The present study tests and substantiates this hypothesis by (a) identifying the signals that mediate the top-down biasing influence, (b) examining whether the cortical areas issuing these signals are task-specific or task-independent, and (c) establishing the possible mechanism of the biasing action. High-density human EEG data were recorded in two experimental paradigms: a trial-by-trial cued visual spatial attention task and a modified Sternberg working memory task. Applying Granger causality to both sensor-level and source-level data we report the following findings. In covert visual spatial attention, the regions exerting top-down control over visual activity are lateralized to the right hemisphere, with the dipoles located at the right frontal eye field (FEF) and the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) being the main sources of top-down influences. During retention of verbal working memory, the regions exerting top-down control over visual activity are lateralized to the left hemisphere, with the dipoles located at the left middle frontal gyrus (MFG) being the main source of top-down influences. In both experiments, top-down influences are mediated by alpha oscillations, and the biasing effect is likely achieved via an inhibition-disinhibition mechanism.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.