TY  - JOUR
A1  - Cordani, Lorenzo
A1  - Tagliazucchi, Enzo
A1  - Vetter, Céline
A1  - Hassemer, Christian
A1  - Roenneberg, Till
A1  - Stehle, Jörg H.
A1  - Kell, Christian Alexander
T1  - Endogenous modulation of human visual cortex activity improves perception at twilight
T2  - Nature Communications
N2  - Perception, particularly in the visual domain, is drastically influenced by rhythmic changes in ambient lighting conditions. Anticipation of daylight changes by the circadian system is critical for survival. However, the neural bases of time-of-day-dependent modulation in human perception are not yet understood. We used fMRI to study brain dynamics during resting-state and close-to-threshold visual perception repeatedly at six times of the day. Here we report that resting-state signal variance drops endogenously at times coinciding with dawn and dusk, notably in sensory cortices only. In parallel, perception-related signal variance in visual cortices decreases and correlates negatively with detection performance, identifying an anticipatory mechanism that compensates for the deteriorated visual signal quality at dawn and dusk. Generally, our findings imply that decreases in spontaneous neural activity improve close-to-threshold perception.
KW  - Circadian rhythms and sleep
KW  - Sensory processing
Y1  - 2018
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/46303
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-463031
SN  - 2041-1723
N1  - Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/. © The Author(s) 2018
VL  - 9
IS  - 1, Art. 1274
SP  - 1
EP  - 9
PB  - Nature Publishing Group UK
CY  - [London]
ER  -