Stimulus-Driven Brain Oscillations in the Alpha Range: Entrainment of Intrinsic Rhythms or Frequency-Following Response?

Abstract

First paragraph: Human brain activity is rich in rhythms of various characteristic frequencies. The last few decades have seen an increase in their use as an explanatory means, with a vast literature describing manifold correlations between dynamics of brain rhythms and behavioral performance in perceptual and cognitive tasks involving attention, memory, and language. More recently, the desire to study the causal role of neural rhythms in stimulus processing and corresponding performance has raised interest in externally entraining these rhythms.