Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Synchronous neural oscillations and cognitive processes
Section snippets
EEG oscillations and cognitive processes
The EEG varies with activity, both in humans and other animals, and particularly with the sleep-wakefulness cycle. Moreover, spectral power at various frequencies (Box 2) changes with age; alpha power increases as children mature whereas theta and delta power decrease. These changes are linked to the more general increase in cognitive competence with maturation, whereas the reverse changes signal declining mental abilities in old age [11]. Alpha waves have been apparent in EEG recordings ever
Theta in memory encoding
Although theta oscillations are apparent in lower animals such as rats, they are seldom seen directly in EEG recordings from humans and it has been difficult to understand what the classically-observed increases in theta power meant [13]. Recently, however, intracranial EEG (iEEG) recordings made from epileptic patients have revealed strong theta oscillations from many areas of the human brain 14, 15. In these experiments, periods in which theta oscillations were apparent were more frequent
Alpha and gamma and attention
Attention is a dynamic process. The attention ‘spotlight’ typically moves from one location in space to another over a period of less than a second to a few seconds, like the spotlight at a variety show. Very general dynamical models of this process have been proposed [33], and much is known about the attention orienting process on the scale of hundreds of milliseconds [34]. The cyclic organization of infants' attention at around 0.5 Hz to 2 Hz is closely related to how efficiently they process
Gamma and consciousness
Crick and Koch suggested over a decade ago that synchronous neural firing at the gamma frequency might be the neural correlate of visual awareness [53]. Since then several important studies have reported correlations between conscious awareness and synchronous neural activity at various frequencies. In one of these, the EEG was recorded while subjects viewed an ambiguous visual stimulus that could be perceived as either a face or as a meaningless shape [54]. When subjects reported seeing a
Synchronous neural oscillations and cognitive science
The research I have discussed supports the idea that the neural oscillations revealed by the EEG and the MEG are closely related to dynamic processes of cognition. They are consistent with the idea that fundamental cognitive processes arise from the synchronous activity of neurons in the brain. Moreover, specific oscillations can be identified with particular cognitive processes: theta and gamma rhythms with memory encoding and retrieval, alpha and gamma rhythms with attentional suppression and
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a Discovery Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to the author. I thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor for useful critical comments on an earlier version.
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