Tracking the Neural Signatures of Predictive Cross-Modal Sensory Processing

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 16, 2024, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Soukhin Das¹ (skndas@ucdavis.edu), Dr. Mingzhou Ding², Dr George (Ron) Mangun³; ¹Department of Psychology and Center for Mind and Brain, University of California Davis, ²J Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Florida, ³1Department of Psychology and Center for Mind and Brain, University of California Davis

Attention is a fundamental cognitive process that extends its influence across various sensory modalities, playing a pivotal role in the integration and processing of multisensory information. Recent studies have proposed that alpha oscillations within 8-12 Hz range may contribute to cross-modal attention, but this remains a topic of debate. Our study investigates the neural basis of cross-modal attention and its relationship to changes in alpha-mediated focal cortical excitability. We recorded EEG from 32 participants engaged in a cued cross-modal attention task. Participants were cued aurally or visually on a trial-by-trial basis to direct attention either to auditory or visual modalities, where they assessed targets (visual gratings/auditory tones). Decoding alpha power using SVM uncovered distinctive patterns in early and late latencies during the cue-to-target period. Alpha oscillations exhibited unique cortical patterns based on the to-be-attended target modality. We found robust decoding accuracies for the to-be-attended modality within respective sensory areas, i.e., central electrodes for the auditory and parieto-occipital electrodes for the visual modality. Temporal generalization further illustrated the evolving nature of alpha patterns over time. For both modalities, our findings indicated the sustained representation of sensory information in a serial manner across the hierarchy, emphasizing the maintenance of predictive processing. Furthermore, an alignment between cortical alpha patterns during stimulus processing and the response window suggested a connection between prediction signals and decision-making processes. Our findings contribute to understanding the role of alpha oscillations in cross-modal attentional control. This work extends the current framework for decoding the neural mechanisms of cross-modal attention.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Multisensory