Attentional enhancement and suppression of stimulus-synchronized BOLD oscillations

Abstract

Visual cortical neurons synchronize their firing rates to periodic visual stimuli. EEG is commonly used to study directed attention by frequency-tagging brain responses to multiple stimuli oscillating at different frequencies, but is limited by its coarse spatial resolution. Here we leverage frequency-tagging fMRI (ft-fMRI) to study the influence of directed attention on the fine-grained spatiotemporal dynamics of competing stimulus-driven visual cortical oscillations. Our analysis reveals that distinct populations of visual cortical neurons exhibit in-phase (enhancing) or anti-phase (suppressive) synchronization with the oscillating stimuli. Directed attention homogeneously increases the amplitude of anti-phase BOLD oscillations across the visual hierarchy, consistent with a distributed suppressive field. In contrast, attentional modulation of in-phase BOLD oscillations increases hierarchically from V1 to hV4. The strength of anti-phase, but not in-phase, modulation predicted psychophysical correlates of attentional performance. Our results strongly corroborate the biased competition model of attention and unveil a novel BOLD correlate of attentional suppression.