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bioRxiv · 10.1101/2025.01.10.632431

Attentional enhancement and suppression of stimulus-synchronized BOLD oscillations

Rafeh, R. W.·Ngo, G. N.·Muller, L. E.·Khan, A. R.·Menon, R. S.·Mur, M.·Schmitz, T. W.
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Abstract

Visual cortical neurons synchronize their firing rates to periodic visual stimuli. EEG is commonly used to study directed attention by frequency-tagging brain responses to multiple stimuli oscillating at different frequencies, but is limited by its coarse spatial resolution. Here we leverage frequency-tagging fMRI (ft-fMRI) to study the influence of directed attention on the fine-grained spatiotemporal dynamics of competing stimulus-driven visual cortical oscillations. Our analysis reveals that distinct populations of visual cortical neurons exhibit in-phase (enhancing) or anti-phase (suppressive) synchronization with the oscillating stimuli. Directed attention homogeneously increases the amplitude of anti-phase BOLD oscillations across the visual hierarchy, consistent with a distributed suppressive field. In contrast, attentional modulation of in-phase BOLD oscillations increases hierarchically from V1 to hV4. The strength of anti-phase, but not in-phase, modulation predicted psychophysical correlates of attentional performance. Our results strongly corroborate the biased competition model of attention and unveil a novel BOLD correlate of attentional suppression.

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Rafeh, R. W., Ngo, G. N., Muller, L. E., Khan, A. R., Menon, R. S., Mur, M., Schmitz, T. W.. 2025-01-11. Attentional enhancement and suppression of stimulus-synchronized BOLD oscillations. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.10.632431

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