查看文章

Visual phenomena like brightness illusions impressively demonstrate the highly constructive nature of perception. In addition to physical illumination, the subjective experience of brightness is related to temporal neural dynamics in visual cortex.

Here, we asked whether biasing the temporal pattern of neural excitability in visual cortex by transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) modulates brightness perception of concurrent rhythmic visual stimuli.

Participants performed a brightness discrimination task of two flickering lights, one of which was targeted by same-frequency electrical stimulation at varying phase shifts. tACS was applied with an occipital and a periorbital active control montage, based on simulations of electrical currents using finite element head models.

Experimental results reveal that flicker brightness perception is modulated dependent on the phase shift …