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The study of alpha band oscillations in the brain is a popular topic in cognitive neuroscience. A fair amount of research in recent years has focused on the potential role these oscillations may play in the discrete sampling of continuous sensory information. In particular, the question of whether or not peak frequency in the alpha band is linked with the temporal resolution of visual perception is a topic of ongoing debate. Some studies have reported a correlation between the two, whereas others were unable to observe a link. It is unclear whether these conflicting findings are due to differing methodologies and/or low statistical power, or due to the absence of a true relationship. Replication studies are needed to gain better insight into this matter. In the current study, we replicated an experiment published in a 2015 paper by Samaha and Postle. Additionally, we expanded on this study by adding an extra behavioural task, the critical flicker fusion task, to investigate if any links with peak alpha frequency are generalizable across multiple measures for visual temporal resolution. We succeeded in replicating some, but not all of Samaha and Postle's findings. Our partial replication suggests that there may be a link between visual temporal resolution and peak alpha frequency. However, this relationship may be very small and only apparent for specific stimulus parameters. The correlations found in our study did not generalize to other behavioural measures for visual temporal resolution., (© 2024 The Author(s). European Journal of Neuroscience published by Federation of European Neuroscience Societies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

The critical flicker fusion threshold is a psychophysical measure commonly used to quantify visual temporal resolution; the fastest rate at which a visual system can discriminate visual signals. Critical flicker fusion thresholds vary substantially among species, reflecting different ecological niches and demands. However, it is unclear how much variation exists in flicker fusion thresholds between healthy individuals of the same species, or how stable this attribute is over time within individuals. In this study, we assessed both inter- and intra-individual variation in critical flicker fusion thresholds in a cohort of healthy human participants within a specific age range, using two common psychophysical methods and three different measurements during each session. The resulting thresholds for each method were highly correlated. We found a between-participant maximum difference of roughly 30 Hz in flicker fusion thresholds and we estimated a 95% prediction interval of 21 Hz. We used random-effects models to compare between- and within-participant variance and found that approximately 80% of variance was due to between-individual differences, and about 10% of the variance originated from within-individual differences over three sessions. Within-individual thresholds did not differ significantly between the three sessions in males, but did in females (P<0.001 for two methods and P<0.05 for one method), indicating that critical flicker fusion thresholds may be more variable in females than in males., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2024 Haarlem et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)