Pre-stimulus alpha oscillation and post-stimulus cortical activity differ in localization between consciously perceived and missed near-threshold somatosensory stimuli.

Abstract

Conscious perception of a near-threshold (NT) stimulus is characterized by the pre- and post-stimulus brain state. However, the power of pre-stimulus neural oscillations and strength of post-stimulus cortical activity that lead to conscious perception have rarely been examined in individual cortical areas. This is because most previous electro- and magnetoencephalography (EEG and MEG, respectively) studies involved scalp- and sensor-level analyses. Therefore, we recorded MEG during a continuous NT somatosensory stimulus detection task and applied the reconstructed source data in order to identify cortical areas where the post-stimulus cortical activity and pre-stimulus alpha oscillation predict the conscious perception of NT somatosensory stimuli. We found that the somatosensory hierarchical processing areas, prefrontal areas and cortical areas belonging to the default mode network showed stronger cortical activity for consciously perceived trials in the post-stimulus period, but the cortical activity in primary somatosensory area (SI) is independent of conscious perception during the early stage of NT stimulus processing. In addition, we revealed that the pre-stimulus alpha oscillation only in SI is predictive of conscious perception. These findings suggest that the bottom-up stream of somatosensory information flow following SI and pre-stimulus alpha activity fluctuation in SI as a top-down modulation are crucial constituents of conscious perception.