Högskolan i Skövde

his.sePublications
Change search
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • apa-cv
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
Transcranial magnetic stimulation of early visual cortex suppresses conscious representations in a dichotomous manner without gradually decreasing their precision
Department of Psychology, University of Turku, Finland / Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Turku, Finland.
Department of Psychology, University of Turku, Finland / Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Turku, Finland.
Department of Psychology, University of Turku, Finland / Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Turku, Finland.
Department of Psychology, University of Turku, Finland / Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Turku, Finland.
Show others and affiliations
2017 (English)In: NeuroImage, ISSN 1053-8119, E-ISSN 1095-9572, Vol. 158, p. 308-318Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of early visual cortex can suppresses visual perception at early stages of processing. The suppression can be measured both with objective forced-choice tasks and with subjective ratings of visual awareness, but there is lack of objective evidence on how and whether the TMS influences the quality of representations. Does TMS decrease the precision of representations in graded manner, or does it lead to dichotomous, "all-or-nothing" suppression. We resolved this question by using a continuous measure of the perceptual error: the observers had to perceive the orientation of a target (Landort-C) and to adjust the orientation of a probe to match that of the target. Mixture modeling was applied to estimate the probability of guess trials and the standard deviation of the non-guess trials. TMS delivered 60-150 ms after stimulus-onset influenced only the guessing rate, whereas the standard deviation (i.e., precision) was not affected. This suggests that TMS suppressed representations dichotomously without affecting their precision. The guessing probability correlated with subjective visibility ratings, suggesting that it measured visual awareness. In a control experiment, manipulation of the stimulus contrast affected the standard deviation of the errors, indicating that contrast has a gradual influence on the precision of representations. The findings suggest that TMS of early visual cortex suppresses perception in dichotomous manner by decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio by increasing the noise level, whereas reduction of the signal level (i.e., contrast) decreases the precision of representations.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2017. Vol. 158, p. 308-318
Keywords [en]
Consciousness, visual cortex
National Category
Neurosciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:his:diva-14672DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.07.011ISI: 000411450600028PubMedID: 28711735Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85024132853OAI: oai:DiVA.org:his-14672DiVA, id: diva2:1176372
Available from: 2018-01-22 Created: 2018-01-22 Last updated: 2019-10-07Bibliographically approved

Open Access in DiVA

No full text in DiVA

Other links

Publisher's full textPubMedScopus

Authority records

Revonsuo, Antti

Search in DiVA

By author/editor
Revonsuo, Antti
In the same journal
NeuroImage
Neurosciences

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar

doi
pubmed
urn-nbn

Altmetric score

doi
pubmed
urn-nbn
Total: 155 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • apa-cv
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf