title: Antecedent occipital alpha band activity predicts the impact of oculomotor events in perceptual switching.
abstract: Oculomotor events such as blinks and saccades transiently interrupt the visual input and, even though this mostly goes undetected, these brief interruptions could still influence the percept. In particular, both blinking and saccades facilitate switching in ambiguous figures such as the Necker cube. To investigate the neural state antecedent to these oculomotor events during the perception of an ambiguous figure, we measured the human scalp electroencephalogram (EEG). When blinking led to perceptual switching, antecedent occipital alpha band activity exhibited a transient increase in amplitude. When a saccade led to switching, a series of transient increases and decreases in amplitude was observed in the antecedent occipital alpha band activity. Our results suggest that the state of occipital alpha band activity predicts the impact of oculomotor events on the percept.
authors.affiliation: Okanoya Emotional Information Project, Exploratory Research for Advanced Technology, Japan Science and Technology Agency Wako-shi, Japan ; Emotional Information Joint Research Laboratory, RIKEN Brain Science Institute Wako-shi, Japan.
authors.forename: Hironori
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Nakatani
authors.forename: Cees
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: van Leeuwen
keywords: Necker cube; ambiguous figures; blinking; electroencephalogram (EEG); perception; saccade