Endogenous modulation of human visual cortex activity improves perception at twilight
- 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.
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| Author: | Lorenzo Cordani, Enzo TagliazucchiORCiDGND, Céline Vetter, Christian Hassemer, Till Roenneberg, Jörg H. StehleGND, Christian Alexander KellORCiDGND |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-463031 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-03660-8 |
| ISSN: | 2041-1723 |
| Pubmed Id: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29636448 |
| Parent Title (English): | Nature Communications |
| Publisher: | Nature Publishing Group UK |
| Place of publication: | [London] |
| Document Type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Year of Completion: | 2018 |
| Date of first Publication: | 2018/04/10 |
| Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
| Release Date: | 2018/04/19 |
| Tag: | Circadian rhythms and sleep; Sensory processing |
| Volume: | 9 |
| Issue: | 1, Art. 1274 |
| Page Number: | 9 |
| First Page: | 1 |
| Last Page: | 9 |
| Note: | 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 |
| HeBIS-PPN: | 432787798 |
| Institutes: | Medizin / Medizin |
| Dewey Decimal Classification: | 6 Technik, Medizin, angewandte Wissenschaften / 61 Medizin und Gesundheit / 610 Medizin und Gesundheit |
| Sammlungen: | Universitätspublikationen |
| Licence (German): |  Creative Commons - Namensnennung 4.0 |
