Systems neuroscienceFeedback modulates the temporal scale-free dynamics of brain electrical activity in a hypothesis testing task
Section snippets
Subjects
Thirteen right-handed graduate and undergraduate students volunteered in the experiment. Subjects had normal or corrected to normal vision and no history of neurological or psychiatric disease. Three of them could not be kept for further analyses due to excessive rates of recording artifacts; while one subject was excluded because she was not naive as to the task’s manipulations. The nine remaining subjects (five women and four men; mean age=25, range 21–30 years) were all blind as to the
Testing DFA and PSA on surrogate data
We first tested on surrogate data the efficiency of DFA and PSA to estimate the correct scaling with our experimental data statistics. As will be shown in the next section, the scaling range over which scaling exponents are estimated is restricted to the interval 156–1248 ms. For every value of the scaling exponent α between 0.7 and 1.3, we generated 100 independent groups of 70 time series (corresponding to the minimum number of observations per subject and condition in the main analysis),
Discussion
The main finding of this study is that the scale-free temporal dynamics of the brain electrical activity during a HT task is modulated by performance feedback: negative feedback elicits a higher degree of temporal scaling (i.e. a higher DFA scaling exponent) than positive feedback. We thus showed that specific task demands modulate the scale-free dynamics of the associated ongoing brain activity.
The two feedback conditions significantly differed at several electrodes clustered around two main
Conclusion
In conclusion, we have shown that the scale-free dynamics of the brain electrical activity are modulated by performance feedback during the preparatory period of a HT task. This result shows that specific cognitive demands can modulate the long-range temporal scaling properties of the ongoing brain activity. We believe that investigating the modulation of long-range scale-free brain temporal dynamics by cognitive processing is a potentially valuable approach to gain new insights on many complex
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Manuela Piazza for insightful discussions and comments on the manuscript. D.P. was supported by a Post-doctoral Fellowship of the Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale, Paris (France). This article is dedicated to the memory of one of the coauthors, Pierre-Marie Baudonnière.
References (51)
- et al.
The locus coeruleus-noradrenergic system: modulation of behavioral state and state-dependent cognitive processes
Brain Res
(2003) - et al.
A nonextensive approach to the entropy of symbolic sequences
Phys A
(1999) - et al.
Differential neural response to positive and negative feedback in planning and guessing tasks
Neuropsychologia
(1997) - et al.
Scale-invariant fluctuations of the dynamical synchronization in human brain electrical activity
Neurosci Lett
(2003) - et al.
A new method for off-line removal of ocular artifact
Electroencephalogr Clin Neurophysiol
(1983) - et al.
Finite-sample effects in sequence-analysis
Chaos Solitons Fractals
(1994) - et al.
Detrended fluctuation analysis of EEG in sleep apnea using MIT/BIH polysomnography data
Comput Biol Med
(2002) - et al.
Brain potentials related to self-generated and external information used for performance monitoring
Clin Neurophysiol
(2005) - et al.
Long-range temporal correlations in electroencephalographic oscillations: relation to topography, frequency band, age and gender
Neuroscience
(2005) - et al.
Non-linear behaviour of human EEG: fractal exponent versus correlation dimension in awake and sleep stages
Neurosci Lett
(1998)
Human anterior cingulate cortex is activated by negative feedback: evidence from event-related potentials in a guessing task
Neurosci Lett
Scale invariance and universality: organizing principles in complex systems
Physica A
Successful declarative memory formation is associated with ongoing activity during encoding in a distributed neocortical network related to working memory: An MEG study
Neuroscience
Is the geometry of nature fractal?
Science
Cellular mechanisms contributing to response variability of cortical neurons in vivo
J Neurosci
Self-organized criticality: An explanation of the 1/f noise
Phys Rev Lett
Self-organized criticality
Phys Rev A
Universality in the brain while listening to music
Proc R Soc Lond B
Long-range correlation properties of coding and noncoding DNA sequences: GenBank analysis
Phys Rev E
1/f(alpha) Noise from self-organized critical models with uniform driving
Phys Rev E
Analysis of spatial patterns of phase in neocortical gamma EEGs in rabbit
J Neurophysiol
Establishing the relation between detrended fluctuation analysis and power spectral density analysis for stochastic processes
Phys Rev E
The neural basis of human error processing: reinforcement learning, dopamine, and the error-related negativity
Psychological Review
What is a moment?Transient synchrony as a collective mechanism for spatiotemporal integration
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
Scaling properties of fluctuations in the human electroencephalogram
Phys Rev E
Cited by (0)
- 1
M.B., D.P. made equally important contributions to this article.