Display and Timing
Choosing a Stimulation Frequency
An important factor when designing your FPVS experiments is the base stimulation frequency, or the rate at which your stimuli are shown on screen. Recent FPVS experiments have used a wide range of base frequencies from 3 Hz to 10 Hz as see in the examples below.
3 Hz
- Super-Recognizers, or Su-Perceivers? Insights from fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) EEG (Nador et al., 2025). Included a 3 Hz condition within a 3, 6, 9, and 12 Hz frequency comparison. DOI
- Steady-state EEG captures how elementary classroom instruction drives plasticity for novel visual words (Wang et al., 2025). Base rate: 3 Hz. DOI
- Preserving Harmonic Structure in FPVS-Oddball: A Two-Dimensional Cluster-Based Permutation Approach (Hermann et al., 2026). Base rate: 3 Hz; oddball rate: 0.5 Hz. DOI
4 Hz
- Frequency-tagging EEG reveals spontaneous categorical discrimination of visual self-identity (Galigani et al., 2025). Base rate: 4 Hz; oddball rate: 0.8 Hz. DOI
- Implicit, automatic semantic word categorisation in the left occipito-temporal cortex as revealed by fast periodic visual stimulation (Volfart et al., 2021). Base rate: 4 Hz; category rate: 1 Hz. DOI
- Neurophysiological evidence for crossmodal (face-name) person-identity representation in the human left ventral temporal cortex (2020). Face and name stimuli were presented at 4 Hz. DOI
5 Hz
- Implicit neural sensitivity for negatively valued social and non-social visual scenes in young adults exposed to childhood adversity (Qiao et al., 2025). Base rate: 5 Hz; oddball rate: 1.25 Hz. DOI
- Visual cues of threat elicit greater steady-state electroencephalographic responses than visual reminders of death (Valentini & Gyimes, 2019). Base rate: 5 Hz; deviant rate: 1 Hz. DOI
6 Hz
- Visual periodicity reveals distinct attentional signatures for face and non-face categories (Quek & de Heering, 2024). Base rate: 6 Hz; periodic category rates: 1.2 and 1.5 Hz. DOI
- Fast Periodic Visual Stimulation indexes preserved semantic memory in healthy ageing (Milton et al., 2020). Base rate: 6 Hz; oddball rate: 1.2 Hz. DOI
8 Hz
- Ensemble size perception: Its neural signature and the role of global interaction over individual items (Jia et al., 2022). Base rate: 8 Hz; oddball rate: 1 Hz. DOI
10 Hz
- Linguistic and attentional factors, not statistical regularities, contribute to word-selective neural responses with FPVS-oddball paradigms (2024). Base rate: 10 Hz; word rate: 2 Hz. DOI
- Word-selective EEG/MEG responses in the English language obtained with fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) (Marchive et al., 2025). Base rate: 10 Hz; word rate: 2 Hz. DOI
- Tracking novel visual word learning via different methods with an original FPVS-EEG approach (Barillon et al., 2025). Base rate: 10 Hz; word rate: 2 Hz. DOI
Retter and Schiltz (2025) demonstrated that the strength of the base rate response, F, often peaks near 10 Hz, whereas the total summed BCA amplitude often peaks below approximately 4 Hz.
Display Refresh Rate
Your display’s refresh rate also determines which base stimulation frequencies are available to you. If your display has a refresh rate of 60 Hz (which is a very common display refresh rate for pc monitors), then each frame on this monitor is visible for 16.67 ms. This means that FPVS stimuli presented at 3 Hz would be visible for 333 ms (20 frames), stimuli presented at 4 Hz would be visible for 250 ms (15 frames), and so on.
However, some frequencies cannot be displayed with a constant number of frames per stimulus on a 60 Hz display, which would cause some inconsistencies in the apparent length of time each stimulus is visible on screen.
| Base rate | Frames per stimulus | Frame-perfect at 60 Hz? |
|---|---|---|
| 3 Hz | 20 | Yes |
| 4 Hz | 15 | Yes |
| 5 Hz | 12 | Yes |
| 6 Hz | 10 | Yes |
| 8 Hz | 7.5 | No |
| 10 Hz | 6 | Yes |
| 12 Hz | 5 | Yes |
An 8 Hz sequence, for example, cannot use a constant number of frames per stimulus on a 60 Hz display. Alternating between frame counts would introduce timing variability. However, if you have a display capable of a 120 Hz refresh rate, the 8 Hz rate is now feasible for your setup as each stimulus can remain visible for exactly 15 frames rather than alternating between 7 and 8 frames.
FPVS Studio detects the device’s measured refresh rate and validates the requested timing whenever an experiment is launched. This prevents an incompatible stimulation rate from silently producing uneven frame timing.