Abstract
The human brain response to a wide range of visual stimulus rates presented over a prolonged time period has been investigated by various neuroimaging techniques. However, to date, no imaging study has been performed to study the dynamic human brain response to various stimulus rates when presented in a short time. This report describes activation in the human brain due to brief visual stimulus presentation (1 s) for stimulus rates varying from 1 to 20 Hz using event-related functional MRI (fMRI). Our results show that the amplitude of the fMRI response increases with the stimulus frequency and plateaus at 6 Hz. This finding differs slightly from the results of previous blocked task paradigm experiments (with a longer time of stimulus presentation), in which the response peaks at approximately 8 Hz and then decreases. Our results are in close agreement with previously published psychophysical studies, suggesting that the fMRI signal in this experiment is indicative of cortical activity related to visual processing.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 21-25 |
| Number of pages | 5 |
| Journal | Magnetic Resonance Imaging |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2001 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by NIH grants P01 MH/DA 52176 and R01 MH 60246. This work was also supported by National Nature Science Foundation of China with grant number: 69790080 (to Lin Chen).
Keywords
- Event-related
- FMRI
- MRI
- Stimulus frequency
- Visual cortex