Abstract
Much is known about electroencephalograph (EEG) patterns during sleep, but until recently, it was difficult to study EEG patterns during conscious, awake behavior. Technological advances such as powerful wireless EEG systems have led to a renewed interest in EEG as a clinical and research tool for studying real-time changes in the brain. We report here the first normative study of EEG activity while healthy young adults completed a series of cognitive tests recently published by the National Institutes of Health Toolbox Cognitive Battery (NIH-TCB), a commonly-used standardized measure of cognition primarily used in clinical populations. In this preliminary study using a wireless EEG system, we examined power spectral density (PSD) in four EEG frequency bands. During baseline and cognitive testing, PSD activity for the lower frequency bands (theta and alpha) was greater, relative to the higher frequency bands (beta and gamma), suggesting participants were relaxed and mentally alert. Alpha, beta and gamma activity was increased during a memory test compared to two other, less demanding executive function tests. Gamma activity was also inversely correlated with performance on the memory test, consistent with the neural efficiency hypothesis which proposes that better cognitive performance may link with lower cortical energy consumption. In summary, our study suggests that cognitive performance is related to the dynamics of EEG activity in a normative young adult population.
Highlights
The monitoring of brain activity during cognition may help to reveal the dynamics of the working human brain, with versatile non-invasive surface electroencephalography (EEG) being one of the tools in doing so
Prior to performing inferential statistics, the data were examined for normality by two methods: skewness and kurtosis were within acceptable limits (±2) according to George and Mallery (2010) and the Q-Q plots were consistent with normal distributions (Thode, 2002, p. 21)
Alpha desynchronization was apparent in all three cognitive tests relative to the baseline, consistent with a large body of literature suggesting that alpha activity may be an attentional suppression mechanism when dimensions of stimuli need to be ignored
Summary
The monitoring of brain activity during cognition may help to reveal the dynamics of the working human brain, with versatile non-invasive surface electroencephalography (EEG) being one of the tools in doing so. The specific EEG frequencies we studied occurred during an eyes-open resting state (baseline), and during a series of cognitive tasks that included the continuous recording of: theta activity (3–7 Hz), alpha activity (8–12 Hz), beta activity (13–29 Hz), and gamma activity (30–40 Hz). While many benefits of using a portable wireless EEG system include the ability to study cognitive functioning in naturalistic settings and the capability of measuring differences in brain activity in freely moving subjects (Rupp et al, 2018; Blanco et al, 2019; Park and Donaldson, 2019), one limitation to this system compared to large multi-channel traditional EEG systems is that recordings confined to electrode positions covered by the few channels in portable systems precludes extensive multi-channel networks evaluation (Ratti et al, 2017)
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