Yanni Zhang¹ (), Han Biao¹, Shen Lu¹, Qi Chen¹; ¹South China Normal University

The human brain employs intrinsic dynamics to predict observed sensory inputs, especially under perceptual ambiguity. Despite rigorous investigations, little is known about how ongoing, spontaneous brain activity participates in bistable perception. The Ternus display serves as an example of this, where subjective perception spontaneously alternates between element motion (EM) and group motion (GM) percepts. In our study, we used intracranial recordings from six human patients with epilepsy to probe the impact of prestimulus ongoing brain activity on perceptual outcomes using the Ternus paradigm. Our findings indicate that the phase of ongoing activity originating from both early visual areas and the prefrontal cortex was covaried with the perceptual outcome. In both regions, we observed a systematic relationship between prestimulus phase and behavioral performance. Moreover, the directed connectivity from the prefrontal cortex to early visual areas was found to predict perceptual outcomes. Taken together, our results highlight the relationship between the phase of ongoing oscillations indicative of neuronal excitability and the perception of ambiguous stimuli, with implications for our understanding of the neural substrates of bistable perception.