The power of human brain magnetoencephalographic signals can be modulated up or down by changes in an attentive visual task

This paper presents evidence indicating that the signals generated by neural responses to visual input can be either enhanced by increasing or suppressed by decreasing the area of the stimuli to which attention is directed. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure the frequency-tagged steady-state visual evoked responses of 11 subjects when presented with two superimposed images flickering at different frequencies. Each image consisted of 7 parallel bars of equal length; in any image, all bars were either red or green and were either horizontal or vertical. At randomly chosen times during the experiments, any one of the three middle bars in either image transiently increased or decreased in width. Subjects were asked to attend to one image and ignore the other, and to respond to changes in bar width in the attended image with a key-press. In one condition, subject responses were required for changes in any of the 3 central bars of the attended image. We found that visual steady-state evoked responses to the attended image were enhanced relative to those evoked by the unattended image in this condition. In a second condition, subject responses were required for changes only in the middle bar. In this condition, the responses to the attended image were suppressed relative to those of the unattended image. These results may reflect relative differences in the synchronization and desynchronization of responding neuronal populations.