Temporal attention and the SSVEP

Understanding how temporal expectations influence our behaviour has become a growing and exciting fiel for cognitive neuroscience researches. And, to provide further evidence on the psychophysiology of temporal expectations is one the cornerstones to achieve. Because of this we implemented a novel approach where we combined a temporal expectation task with the Stead-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP). We wanted to evaluate the feasibility of the SSVEP to study temporal attention. Our results provided evidence for the implementation of the SSVEP to study temporal attention, particularly for SSVEP stimuli presented at 10Hz, where we observed an attention-modulation effect on the SSVEP amplitude. 30 subjects participated in the data collection. Data from two subjects wererejected due to poor behavioral performance. During EEG pre processing, the dataof one subject were rejected due to excessive eye-blink artifacts in more than 30% of the trials and excessive lateral eye movements (i.e., left-right) at the time of target presentation. Finally, during the SSVEP analysis, data from two subjects were rejected due to an absence of visible SSVEP response in the power spectral plots. Thus, data from 25 participants (11 males, mean age 25.04, one left-handed) were included in the final analysis. All subjects had normal or corrected-to-normal vision. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki,relevant laws, and institutional guidelines, and was approved by the study was approved by the local ethics committee at the Psychology Department at the University of Amsterdam.Participants signed an informed consent document prior to the beginning of the experiment and they were paid for their participation.