A new foreperiod effect on single-trial phase coherence. Part I: existence and relevance

Expecting events in time leads to more efficient behavior. A remarkable early finding in the study of temporal expectancy is the foreperiod effect on reaction times; i.e., the fact that the time period between a warning signal and an impendent stimuli, to which subjects are instructed to respond as quickly as possible, influences reaction times. Recently it has been shown that the phase of oscillatory activity preceding stimulus presentation is related to behavior. Here we connect both of these findings by reporting a novel foreperiod effect on the inter-trial phase coherence triggered by a stimulus to which subjects do not respond. Until now, inter-trial phase coherence has been used to describe a regularity in the phases of groups of trials. We propose a single-trial measure of inter-trial phase coherence and prove its soundness. Equipped with this measure, and using a multivariate decoding method, we demonstrate that the foreperiod duration modulates single-trial phase coherence. In principle, this modulation could be an artifact due to the decoding method used to detect it. We show that this is not the case, since the modulation can also be observed with a very simple averaging method. Although real, the single-trial modulation of inter-trial phase coherence by the foreperiod duration could just reflect a nuisance in our data. We argue against this possibility by showing that the strength of the modulation correlates with subjects’ behavioral measures, both error rates and mean-reaction times. We anticipate that the new foreperiod effect on inter-trial phase coherence, and the decoding method used here to detect it, will be important tools to understand cognition at the single-trial level. In Part II of this manuscript, we support this claim, by showing that attention modulates the strength of the new foreperiod effect in a trial-by-trial basis.