RESEARCH ARTICLE Multiple mechanisms link prestimulus neural oscillations to sensory responses Luca Iemi1,2,3*, Niko A Busch4,5, Annamaria Laudini6, Saskia Haegens1,7, Jason Samaha8, Arno Villringer2,6, Vadim V Nikulin2,3,9,10* 1Department of Neurological Surgery, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York City, United States; 2Department of Neurology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany; 3Centre for Cognition and Decision Making, Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russian Federation; 4Institute of Psychology, University of Mu¨ nster, Mu¨ nster, Germany; 5Otto Creutzfeldt Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Mu¨ nster, Mu¨ nster, Germany; 6Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt- Universita¨ t zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany; 7Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands; 8Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, United States; 9Department of Neurology, Charite´-Universita¨ tsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany; 10Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Berlin, Germany Abstract Spontaneous fluctuations of neural activity may explain why sensory responses vary across repeated presentations of the same physical stimulus. To test this hypothesis, we recorded electroencephalography in humans during stimulation with identical visual stimuli and analyzed how prestimulus neural oscillations modulate different stages of sensory processing reflected by distinct components of the event-related potential (ERP). We found that strong prestimulus alpha- and beta-band power resulted in a suppression of early ERP components (C1 and N150) and in an *For correspondence: amplification of late components (after 0.4 s), even after controlling for fluctuations in 1/f aperiodic
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