Attentional Modulations of Alpha Power Are Sensitive to the Task-relevance of Auditory Spatial Information

Abstract

The topographical distribution of oscillatory power in the alpha band is known to vary depending on the current focus of spatial attention. Here, we investigated to what extend univariate and multivariate measures of post-stimulus alpha power are sensitive to the required spatial specificity of a task. To this end, we varied the perceptual load and the spatial demand in an auditory search paradigm. A centrally presented sound at the beginning of each trial indicated the to-be-localized target sound. This spatially unspecific pre-cue was followed by a sound array, containing either two (low perceptual load) or four (high perceptual load) simultaneously presented lateralized sound stimuli. In separate task blocks, participants were instructed either to report whether the target was located on the left or the right side of the sound array (low spatial demand) or to indicate the exact target location (high spatial demand). Univariate alpha lateralization magnitude was neither affected by perceptual load nor by spatial demand. However, an analysis of onset latencies revealed that alpha lateralization emerged earlier in low (vs. high) perceptual load trials as well as in low (vs. high) spatial demand trials. Finally, we trained a classifier to decode the specific target location based on the multivariate alpha power scalp topography. A comparison of decoding accuracy in the low and high spatial demand conditions suggests that the amount of spatial information present in the scalp distribution of alpha-band power increases as the task demands a higher degree of spatial specificity. Altogether, the results offer new insights into how the dynamic adaption of alpha-band oscillations in response to changing task demands is associated with post-stimulus attentional processing.