Cross-frequency phase synchrony around the saccade period as a correlate of perceiver's internal state

Chie Nakatani, Mojtaba Chehelcheraghi, Behnaz Jarrahi, Hironori Nakatani, Cees van Leeuwen

In active vision, eye-movements depend on perceivers' internal state. We investigated peri-fixation brain activity for internal state-specific tagging. Human participants performed a task, in which a visual object was presented for identification in lateral visual field, to which they moved their eyes as soon as possible from a central fixation point. Next, a phrase appeared in the same location; the phrase could either be an easy or hard question about the object, answered by pressing one of two alternative response buttons, or it could be an instruction to simply press one of these two buttons. Depending on whether these messages were blocked or randomly mixed, one of two different internal states was induced: either the task was known in advance or it wasn't. Eye movements and electroencephalogram (EEG) were recorded simultaneously during task performance. Using eye-event-time-locked averaging and independent component analysis, saccade- and fixation-related components were identified. Coss-frequency phase-synchrony was observed between the alpha/beta1 ranges of fixation-related and beta2/gamma1 ranges of saccade-related activity 50 ms prior to fixation onset in the mixed-phrase condition only. We interpreted this result as evidence for internal state-specific tagging.