Concurrent visual and tactile steady-state evoked potentials index allocation of inter-modal attention: A frequency-tagging study

Porcu, E., Keitel, C. and Müller, M. M. (2013) Concurrent visual and tactile steady-state evoked potentials index allocation of inter-modal attention: A frequency-tagging study. Neuroscience Letters, 556, pp. 113-117. (doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2013.09.068) (PMID:24120431)

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Abstract

We investigated effects of inter-modal attention on concurrent visual and tactile stimulus processing by means of stimulus-driven oscillatory brain responses, so-called steady-state evoked potentials (SSEPs). To this end, we frequency-tagged a visual (7.5 Hz) and a tactile stimulus (20 Hz) and participants were cued, on a trial-by-trial basis, to attend to either vision or touch to perform a detection task in the cued modality. SSEPs driven by the stimulation comprised stimulus frequency-following (i.e. fundamental frequency) as well as frequency-doubling (i.e. second harmonic) responses. We observed that inter-modal attention to vision increased amplitude and phase synchrony of the fundamental frequency component of the visual SSEP while the second harmonic component showed an increase in phase synchrony, only. In contrast, inter-modal attention to touch increased SSEP amplitude of the second harmonic but not of the fundamental frequency, while leaving phase synchrony unaffected in both responses. Our results show that inter-modal attention generally influences concurrent stimulus processing in vision and touch, thus, extending earlier audio-visual findings to a visuo-tactile stimulus situation. The pattern of results, however, suggests differences in the neural implementation of inter-modal attentional influences on visual vs. tactile stimulus processing.

Item Type:Articles
Additional Information:Supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; Grant number GRK-1182, Graduate program “Function of Attention in Cognition”).
Status:Published
Refereed:Yes
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Keitel, Dr Christian
Authors: Porcu, E., Keitel, C., and Müller, M. M.
College/School:College of Medical Veterinary and Life Sciences > School of Psychology & Neuroscience
Journal Name:Neuroscience Letters
Publisher:Elsevier
ISSN:0304-3940
ISSN (Online):1872-7972
Published Online:10 October 2013

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