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Attentional Modulations of Alpha Power Are Sensitive to the Task-relevance of Auditory Spatial Information

View ORCID ProfileLaura-Isabelle Klatt, View ORCID ProfileStephan Getzmann, View ORCID ProfileDaniel Schneider
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.12.430942
Laura-Isabelle Klatt
1Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors
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  • For correspondence: klatt@ifado.de
Stephan Getzmann
1Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors
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Daniel Schneider
1Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors
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Abstract

The topographical distribution of oscillatory power in the alpha band is known to vary depending on the current focus of spatial attention. Here, we investigated to what extend univariate and multivariate measures of post-stimulus alpha power are sensitive to the required spatial specificity of a task. To this end, we varied the perceptual load and the spatial demand in an auditory search paradigm. A centrally presented sound at the beginning of each trial indicated the to-be-localized target sound. This spatially unspecific pre-cue was followed by a sound array, containing either two (low perceptual load) or four (high perceptual load) simultaneously presented lateralized sound stimuli. In separate task blocks, participants were instructed either to report whether the target was located on the left or the right side of the sound array (low spatial demand) or to indicate the exact target location (high spatial demand). Univariate alpha lateralization magnitude was neither affected by perceptual load nor by spatial demand. However, an analysis of onset latencies revealed that alpha lateralization emerged earlier in low (vs. high) perceptual load trials as well as in low (vs. high) spatial demand trials. Moreover, across all conditions, participants with earlier alpha lateralization onset showed faster response times. Finally, we trained a classifier to decode the specific target location based on the multivariate alpha power scalp topography. A comparison of decoding accuracy in the low and high spatial demand conditions suggests that the amount of spatial information present in the scalp distribution of alpha-band power increases as the task demands a higher degree of spatial specificity. Altogether, the results offer new insights into how the dynamic adaption of alpha-band oscillations in response to changing task demands is associated with post-stimulus attentional processing.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted February 14, 2021.
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Attentional Modulations of Alpha Power Are Sensitive to the Task-relevance of Auditory Spatial Information
Laura-Isabelle Klatt, Stephan Getzmann, Daniel Schneider
bioRxiv 2021.02.12.430942; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.12.430942
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Attentional Modulations of Alpha Power Are Sensitive to the Task-relevance of Auditory Spatial Information
Laura-Isabelle Klatt, Stephan Getzmann, Daniel Schneider
bioRxiv 2021.02.12.430942; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.12.430942

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