Abstract
Previous studies showed that scale-free structures and long-range temporal correlations are ubiquitous in physiological signals (e.g., electroencephalography). This is supposed to be associated with optimized information processing in human brain. The instantaneous alpha frequency (IAF) (i.e., the instantaneous frequency of alpha band of human EEG signals) may dictate the resolution at which information is sampled and/or processed by cortical neurons. To the best of our knowledge, no research has examined the scale-free dynamics and potential functional significance of IAF. Here, through three studies (Study 1: 25 participants; Study 2: 82 participants; Study 3: 26 participants), we investigated the possibility that time series of IAF exhibit scale-free property through maximum likelihood based detrended fluctuation analysis (ML-DFA). This technique could provide the scaling exponent (i.e., DFA exponent) on the basis of presence of scale-freeness being validated. Then the test–retest reliability (Study 1) and potential influencing factors (Study 2 and Study 3) of DFA exponent of IAF fluctuations were investigated. Firstly, the scale-free property was found to be inherent in IAF fluctuations with fairly high test–retest reliability over the parietal-occipital region. Moreover, the task manipulations could potentially modulate the DFA exponent of IAF fluctuations. Specifically, in Study 2, we found that the DFA exponent of IAF fluctuations in eye-closed resting-state condition was significantly larger than that in eye-open resting-state condition. In Study 3, we found that the DFA exponent of IAF fluctuations in eye-open resting-state condition was significantly larger than that in visual n-back tasks. The DFA exponent of IAF fluctuations in the 0-back task was significantly larger than in the 2-back and 3-back tasks. The results in studies 2 and 3 indicated that: (1) a smaller DFA exponent of IAF fluctuations should signify more efficient online visual information processing; (2) the scaling property of IAF fluctuations could reflect the physiological arousal level of participants.
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Data Availability
The datasets of Study 1 and Study 2 are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request subject to a formal data sharing agreement with Prof. Fei Gao and Prof. Hua Wei. The dataset of Study 3 are available at http://doc.ml.tu-berlin.de/simultaneous_EEG_NIRS/.
Code Availability
The MATLAB code here is available from the corresponding author, Prof. Fei Gao, upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
The work was supported by Post-funded Project of the National Social Science Fund under Grant 20FJKB005, Henan Province Philosophy and Social Sciences Outstanding Scholars Project under Grant 2018-YXXZ-03, the Philosophy and Social Sciences Planning Project of Henan Province under Grant 2020BJY010, Postgraduate Cultivating Innovation and Quality Improvement Action Plan of Henan University under Grant SYLYC2022039 and Henan University Philosophy and Social Science Innovation Team under Grant 2019CXTD009.
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HJ: Conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, writing—original draft. XW: Formal analysis, writing—original draft. EW: Supervision, funding acquisition, writing—review & editing. HW: Data curation, formal analysis, writing—review & editing. FG: Conceptualization, supervision, data curation, formal analysis, methodology, writing—review & editing.
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The experimental procedures were approved by the local ethics committee of Peking University People’s Hospital (Study 1), Nanjing University (Study 2) and Berlin Institute of Technology (Study 3).
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Jia, H., Wu, X., Wang, E. et al. Scale-Free Dynamics in Instantaneous Alpha Frequency Fluctuations: Validation, Test–Retest Reliability and Its Relationship with Task Manipulations. Brain Topogr 36, 230–242 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10548-022-00936-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10548-022-00936-7