Rhythmic Cognition

This Perspective argues for a revised mechanism for the functional role of alpha oscillations. While alpha oscillations reflect inhibition, they are controlled by an indirect mechanism governed by the load of goal-relevant information.

Social cognition is coordinated by interregional phase-amplitude coupling similar to visual working memory. This coupling could explain potential behavioral differences in social and visual working memory between individuals varying in autistic personality traits.

This study provides evidence that bottom-up rhythmic features interact with top-down metric structures in a way that shapes the pleasurable urge to move to music.

Two EEG studies in healthy human adults suggest that choice history and stimulus probability-induced biases in somatosensory perception are reflected in distinct prestimulus beta power modulations across distinct cortical regions.

This study shows that information about the orientation of stimuli presented around the time of saccadic eye movements oscillates at alpha frequencies (9 Hz), consistent with the notion that perceptual history is preserved by oscillatory mechanisms creating a “perceptual echo”.

People can direct attention to specific moments that they anticipate will be relevant to their goals. Here, the authors show that voluntary temporal attention engages both periodic and transient modulations of visual cortical activity to improve perception at precise time points.

The authors show that neuronal populations in the human prefrontal-motor network interact via two discernible communication modes – ramping dynamics and neural oscillations. These modes operate in concert to facilitate rule-guided behavior.

Speech and music processing appear to involve partially distinct rhythmic timing mechanisms. A perception and a synchronization task show distinct optimal temporal rates for perception and production of music and speech.

How does the brain support a wide range of behaviours? Mohan et al. examine how the direction of travelling waves of neural oscillations coordinates interactions between brain regions to support different functional processes in memory.

Brus et al. show that modulation of slow oscillatory neural activity with non-invasive electrical stimulation of the prefrontal cortex can be used to modulate top-down control and behavioural performance in non-spatial attention.