Occipitoparietal alpha-band responses to the graded allocation of top-down spatial attention

The voluntary, top-down allocation of visual spatial attention has been linked to changes in the alpha-band of the electroencephalogram (EEG) signal measured over occipital and parietal lobes. In the present study, we investigated how occipitoparietal alpha-band activity changes when people allocate their attentional resources in a graded fashion across the visual field. We asked participants to either completely shift their attention into one hemifield, to balance their attention equally across the entire visual field, or to attribute more attention to one-half of the visual field than to the other. As expected, we found that alpha-band amplitudes decreased stronger contralaterally than ipsilaterally to the attended side when attention was shifted completely. Alpha-band amplitudes decreased bilaterally when attention was balanced equally across the visual field. However, when participants allocated more attentional resources to one-half of the visual field, this was not reflected in the alpha-band amplitudes, which just decreased bilaterally. We found that the performance of the participants was more strongly reflected in the coherence between frontal and occipitoparietal brain regions. We conclude that low alpha-band amplitudes seem to be necessary for stimulus detection. Furthermore, complete shifts of attention are directly reflected in the lateralization of alpha-band amplitudes. In the present study, a gradual allocation of visual attention across the visual field was only indirectly reflected in the alpha-band activity over occipital and parietal cortexes.