Abstract:
Motion Induced Blindness (MIB) is a phenomenon involving the spontaneous disappearance and reappearance of highly salient static objects when viewed against a moving background. As a phenomenon MIB offers the potential to provide pivotal insights into the neural correlates of visual consciousness. Despite this much about the mechanisms associated with MIB remains to be discovered. Considering the relative youth of the phenomenon, the literature associated remains limited. In particular, a lack of electroencephalography (EEG) studies exists. This technique has great potential in the investigation of MIB due to its excellent temporal resolution. The current study utilised this method by attempting to isolate particular neural-oscillators and their respective locations during MIB and across varying conditions. Three separate conditions during a controlled experiment produced the EEG data which was analysed via time-frequency analyses to obtain a number of findings. These conditions were exploratory and examined the electrophysiological changes associated with changes in conscious perception, and with changes in physical stimulation. Our main findings include the observation that significant neural-oscillatory differences occurred in the delta frequency range. These differences were maximal at frontal-midline areas of the frontal lobe. These findings, together with a consideration of previous research, suggest that the mechanism associated with the occurrence of spontaneous target disappearance in MIB is likely to involve long-range cortico-cortical networks interacting with the frontal and parietal lobes, along with the visual cortex. The involvement of two known neurocognitive networks, the fronto-parietal and default mode networks, appear to contribute to the activity associated the MIB phenomenon.
