Asymmetry in prefrontal resting-state EEG spectral power underlies individual differences in phasic and sustained cognitive control

Abstract

In our daily life, we constantly exert sustained and phasic cognitive control processes to manage multiple competing task sets and rapidly switch between them. Increasing research efforts are attempting to unveil how the brain mediates these processes, highlighting the importance of the prefrontal cortex. An intriguing question concerns the influence of hemispheric asymmetries and whether it may be generalized to different cognitive domains depending on lateralized processing. Another currently open question concerns the underlying causes of the observed huge inter-individual variability in cognitive control abilities. Here we tackle these issues by investigating whether participants' hemispheric asymmetry in intrinsic (i.e., resting-state-related) brain dynamics can reflect differences in their phasic and/or sustained cognitive control abilities regardless of the cognitive domain. To this aim, we recorded human participants' resting-state electroencephalographic activity and performed a source-based spectral analysis to assess their lateralized brain dynamics at rest. Moreover, we used three task-switching paradigms involving different cognitive domains to assess participants' domain-general phasic and sustained cognitive control abilities. By performing a series of correlations and an intersection analysis, we showed that participants with stronger left- and right-lateralized intrinsic brain activity in the middle frontal gyrus were more able, respectively, to exert phasic and sustained cognitive control. We propose that the variability in participants' prefrontal hemispheric asymmetry in the intrinsic electrophysiological spectral profile reflects individual differences in preferentially engaging either the left-lateralized, phasic or the right-lateralized, sustained cognitive control processes to regulate their behavior in response to changing task demands, regardless of the specific cognitive domain involved.