Behavioral stochastic resonance associated with large-scale synchronization of human brain activity

We demonstrate experimentally that enhanced detection of weak visual signals by addition of visual noise is accompanied by an increase in phase synchronization of EEG signals across widely-separated areas of the human brain. In our sensorimotor integration task, observers responded to a weak rectangular gray-level signal presented to their right eyes by pressing and releasing a button whenever they detected an increment followed by a decrement in brightness. Signal detection performance was optimized by presenting randomly-changing-gray-level noise separately to observers' left eyes using a mirror stereoscope. We measured brain electrical activity at the scalp by electroencephalograph (EEG), calculated the instantaneous phase for each EEG signal, and evaluated the degree of large-scale phase synchronization between pairs of EEG signals. Dynamic synchronization-desynchronization patterns were observed and we found evidence of noise-enhanced large-scale synchronization associated with detection of the brightness changes under conditions of noise-enhanced performance. Our results suggest that behavioral stochastic resonance might arise from noise-enhanced synchronization of neural activities across widespread brain regions.

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