29 June 2026, by Uğur Turhan

A new study co-authored by Maryam and led by Marcus Siems, in collaboration with Yinan Cao, Tobias H. Donner and Konstantinos Tsetsos, has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

The research reveals that the brain uses covert attention to rhythmically sample decision-relevant information, unravelling the neural mechanism of decision-making. To investigate this process, the team combined magnetoencephalography (MEG) with neural decoding while participants performed a three-alternative perceptual decision-making task.

They found that the strength of covert attention fluctuates rhythmically at approximately 11 Hz. Attention towards the currently sampled alternative increases at the peak of this oscillation, whereas shifts in attention to another alternative occur at its trough. These results suggest that intrinsic attentional oscillations help govern how the brain flexibly samples and compares multiple decision alternatives.

Link to the full article.