Highest performance requires an optimal effort: A MEG study on visual perception

Twelve subjects (6 males; 17-64 years) participated in magnetoencephalography (MEG) experiments designed to study visual response to flickering Necker cubes. Event-related fields in the lateral occipital complex and steady-state response in the visual region V1 and V2 were studied to characterise the early response time durations and attentional capacity during the trial time period of 5-s, respectively. We found that there was an optimal response time duration for which the attention capacity was maximum. The results also support the hypothesis that stimulus detection in brain is driven by coherence resonance.