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Cited by 682

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 14 of the 14 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Spontaneous Fluctuations in Posterior -Band EEG Activity Reflect Variability in Excitability of Human Visual Areas

Open access
Romei, V., Brodbeck, V., Michel, C., Amedi, A., Pascual-Leone, A., Thut, G.·2008·Cerebral Cortex

Abstract

Neural activity fluctuates dynamically with time, and these changes have been reported to be of behavioral significance, despite occurring spontaneously. Through electroencephalography (EEG), fluctuations in alpha-band (8-14 Hz) activity have been identified over posterior sites that covary on a trial-by-trial basis with whether an upcoming visual stimulus will be detected or not. These fluctuations are thought to index the momentary state of visual cortex excitability. Here, we tested this hypothesis by directly exciting human visual cortex via transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to induce illusory visual percepts (phosphenes) in blindfolded participants, while simultaneously recording EEG. We found that identical TMS-stimuli evoked a percept (P-yes) or not (P-no) depending on prestimulus alpha-activity. Low prestimulus alpha-band power resulted in TMS reliably inducing phosphenes (P-yes trials), whereas high prestimulus alpha-values led the same TMS-stimuli failing to evoke a visual percept (P-no trials). Additional analyses indicated that the perceptually relevant fluctuations in alpha-activity/visual cortex excitability were spatially specific and occurred on a subsecond time scale in a recurrent pattern. Our data directly link momentary levels of posterior alpha-band activity to distinct states of visual cortex excitability, and suggest that their spontaneous fluctuation constitutes a visual operation mode that is activated automatically even without retinal input.

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Crossref · 10.1093/cercor/bhm229

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Metadata

Authors
Romei, V., Brodbeck, V., Michel, C., Amedi, A., Pascual-Leone, A., & Thut, G.
Venue
Cerebral Cortex
Published
2007-12-18
Volume
18
Issue
9
Pages
2010-2018
ISSN
  • 1047-3211 (ISSN-L)
  • 1460-2199
OpenAlex
W2171783484
Cited by
682
References
14
FWCI
10.52
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Spontaneous Fluctuations in Posterior -Band EEG Activity Reflect Variability in Excitability of Human Visual Areas. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1093/cercor/bhm229
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Romei, V., Brodbeck, V., Michel, C., Amedi, A., Pascual-Leone, A., & Thut, G. (2008). Spontaneous Fluctuations in Posterior -Band EEG Activity Reflect Variability in Excitability of Human Visual Areas. Cerebral Cortex. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhm229

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Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.