Microsaccades and EEG alpha oscillations: a close relationship?
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1
Humboldt University at Berlin, Germany
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2
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany
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3
Potsdam University, Germany
Microsaccades (MS) are small (< 1°), involuntary eye movements that occur at an average rate of 1-2/sec during visual fixation. MS have received considerable attention by the EEG community after it was shown that muscle spikes from MS contaminate the gamma band (Yuval-Greenberg et al., 2008). At last ICON, we demonstrated that MS also generate sizeable scalp-recordable brain activity, in particular the P1-like microsaccadic lambda response, which is most likely a visual response to the retinal image shift (Dimigen et al., 2009). However, when analyzing ERPs time-locked to MS in an oddball task, we observed that MS were also followed by a temporally extended, damped EEG oscillation over occipital cortex (here called “microsaccadic alpha ringing”, MAR), consisting of several cycles of alpha activity (~10 Hz). Goal of the present study was to replicate this phenomenon and to investigate the relationship between MS and alpha. Fixational eye movements and EEG were co-recorded in four common experimental paradigms (face classification, word classification, lexical decision, detection of near-threshold stimuli in peripheral vision, total n = 30), as well as during steady fixation in daylight and total darkness (n = 16). While its amplitude varied, some MAR was observed in all five paradigms (and four independent subject samples), indicating that alpha ringing after microsaccades it is a universal phenomenon. The synchronization of MS-onsets with regard to the phase of ongoing alpha oscillations was analyzed to distinguish between three possible accounts for MAR: (1) microsaccades generate an evoked oscillation in the alpha range; (2) microsaccades phase-reset the ongoing alpha rhythm; (3) microsaccades are generated phase-locked to the ongoing alpha cycle.
Keywords:
brain oscillations,
EEG
Conference:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI), Palma, Mallorca, Spain, 25 Sep - 29 Sep, 2011.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Poster Sessions: Quantitative Analysis of EEG, MEG & Brain Oscillations
Citation:
Dimigen
O,
Werkle-Bergner
M,
Meyberg
S,
Kliegl
R and
Sommer
W
(2011). Microsaccades and EEG alpha oscillations: a close relationship?.
Conference Abstract:
XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI).
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2011.207.00128
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Received:
17 Nov 2011;
Published Online:
28 Nov 2011.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Olaf Dimigen, Humboldt University at Berlin, Berlin, Germany, olaf.dimigen@hu-berlin.de