Microsaccades and EEG alpha oscillations: A close relationship?
| Main Authors: | Dimigen, Olaf, Werkle-Bergner, Markus, Meyberg, Susann, Kliegl, Reinhold, Sommer, Werner |
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| Format: | Proceeding Journal |
| Terbitan: |
, 2011
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: |
https://zenodo.org/record/5655239 |
Daftar Isi:
- Microsaccades (MS) are small (< 1°), involuntary eye movements that occur at an average rate of 1-2/sec during visual fixation. MS have received considerable attention by the EEG community after it was shown that muscle spikes from MS contaminate the gamma band (Yuval-Greenberg et al., 2008). At last ICON, we demonstrated that MS also generate sizeable scalp-recordable brain activity, in particular the P1-like microsaccadic lambda response, which is most likely a visual response to the retinal image shift (Dimigen et al., 2009). However, when analyzing ERPs time-locked to MS in an oddball task, we observed that MS were also followed by a temporally extended, damped EEG oscillation over occipital cortex (here called “microsaccadic alpha ringing”, MAR), consisting of several cycles of alpha activity (~10 Hz). Goal of the present study was to replicate this phenomenon and to investigate the relationship between MS and alpha. Fixational eye movements and EEG were co-recorded in four common experimental paradigms (face classification, word classification, lexical decision, detection of near-threshold stimuli in peripheral vision, total n = 30), as well as during steady fixation in daylight and total darkness (n = 16). While its amplitude varied, some MAR was observed in all five paradigms (and four independent subject samples), indicating that alpha ringing after microsaccades it is a universal phenomenon. The synchronization of MS-onsets with regard to the phase of ongoing alpha oscillations was analyzed to distinguish between three possible accounts for MAR: (1) microsaccades generate an evoked oscillation in the alpha range; (2) microsaccades phase-reset the ongoing alpha rhythm; (3) microsaccades are generated phase-locked to the ongoing alpha cycle.
- Published in Frontiers special conference issue: https://www.frontiersin.org/10.3389/conf.fnhum.2011.207.00128/event_abstract, Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0, corresponding author: olaf.dimigen@hu-berlin.de