The objective of the present study was to investigate whether brain oscillations play a role in rewarded learning. Previous research has shown that alpha oscillations in ventromedial prefrontal cortex are correlated with the reward prediction error from a reinforcement learning model of a subject's choice behavior in the Iowa Gambling Task. However, the macroscopic extent of these oscillations,...

Predictions strongly influence perception. However, the neurophysiological processes that implement predictions remain underexplored. It has been proposed that high- and low-frequency neuronal oscillations act as carriers of sensory evidence and top-down predictions, respectively (von Stein and Sarnthein 2000; Bastos et al. 2012). However, evidence for the latter hypothesis remains scarce. In p...

There is increasing interest in understanding how the phase and amplitude of distinct neural oscillations might interact to support dynamic communication within the brain. In particular, previous work has demonstrated a coupling between the phase of low frequency oscillations and the amplitude (or power) of high frequency oscillations during certain tasks, termed phase amplitude coupling (PAC)....

The pedunculopontine nucleus (PPN) has recently been introduced as a new therapeutic target for deep brain stimulation (DBS) in patients suffering from Parkinson's disease (PD). In a recent case report it was demonstrated that alpha frequency oscillations appear in PPN after the administration of levodopa in PD, indicating a possible physiological role of these oscillations. Here we confirm thi...

The physiological state of the brain before an incoming stimulus has substantial consequences for subsequent behavior and neural processing. For example, the phase of ongoing posterior alpha-band oscillations (8-14 Hz) immediately before visual stimulation has been shown to predict perceptual outcomes and downstream neural activity. Although this phenomenon suggests that these oscillations may ...

Previous studies have shown that neural oscillations in the 8- to 12-Hz range influence sensory perception. In the current study, we examined whether both the power and phase of these mu/alpha oscillations predict successful conscious tactile perception. Near-threshold tactile stimuli were applied to the left hand while electroencephalographic (EEG) activity was recorded over the contralateral ...

BACKGROUND Impressive in vitro research in rodents and computational modeling has uncovered the core mechanisms responsible for generating neuronal oscillations. In particular, GABAergic interneurons play a crucial role for synchronizing neural populations. Do these mechanistic principles apply to human oscillations associated with function? To address this, we recorded ongoing brain activity u...

Synchronization of neuronal activity, often associated with network oscillations, is thought to provide a means for integrating anatomically distributed processing in the brain. Neuronal processing, however, involves simultaneous oscillations in various frequency bands. The mechanisms involved in the integration of such spectrally distributed processing have remained enigmatic. We demonstrate, ...

When operating in a complex world, it is essential to have mechanisms that can suppress distracting information. Such mechanisms might be related to neuronal oscillations, which are known to be involved in gating of incoming information. We here apply a working memory (WM) task to investigate how neuronal oscillations are involved in the suppression of distracting information that can be predic...

Current findings show some brain regions consistently related to performance of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). An increase of local cerebral blood flow or metabolic demands has been detected in those regions. Functional integration of the neuronal circuits that subserve the task performance, based upon the identification of the oscillations and their distributed cerebral sources, has n...