Infraslow fluctuations of sustained attention in mood disorders.

Background: Sustained attention is integral to goal-directed tasks in everyday life. It is a demanding and effortful process prone to failure. Deficits are particularly prevalent in mood disorders.

Causal manipulation of feed-forward and recurrent processing differentially affects measures of consciousness.

It has been theorized that cortical feed-forward and recurrent neural activity support unconscious and conscious cognitive processes, respectively. Here we causally tested this proposition by applying event-related transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) at early and late times relative to visual stimuli, together with a pulse designed to suppress conscious detection. Consistent with pre-registered hypotheses, early TMS affected residual, reportedly 'unseen' capacity.