Baseline alpha wave predicts post-cue alpha during visual spatial attention with linear mixed model

Electroencephalography alpha-band (8–13 Hz) activity following spatial cues during visual attention has been extensively studied. However, its functional role remains unclear, possibly due to individual differences or contributing factors. Our recent study showed that post-cue alpha activity depended on baseline alpha by splitting participants based on their median baseline alpha, which, however, ignored the difference in baseline alpha within the subgroups. We thus re-analyzed post-cue alpha with the linear mixed model (LMM), considering individual differences and larger sample sizes for the predictability of baseline alpha. We found that post-cue alpha wave could be well predicted by baseline alpha in two tasks (n = 30 each) with instructional and probabilistic cues based on the LMM (R²=0.994). Our results showed that the LMM was superior in tackling the contributing factors in the study of post-cue alpha activity, and baseline alpha could be a reliable predictor of post-cue alpha activity in visual spatial attention.