title: Exploring age-related changes in dynamical non-stationarity in electroencephalographic signals during early adolescence.
abstract: Dynamics of brain signals such as electroencephalogram (EEG) can be characterized as a sequence of quasi-stable patterns. Such patterns in the brain signals can be associated with coordinated neural oscillations, which can be modeled by non-linear systems. Further, these patterns can be quantified through dynamical non-stationarity based on detection of qualitative changes in the state of the systems underlying the observed brain signals. This study explored age-related changes in dynamical non-stationarity of the brain signals recorded at rest, longitudinally with 128-channel EEG during early adolescence (10 to 13 years of age, 56 participants). Dynamical non-stationarity was analyzed based on segmentation of the time series with subsequent grouping of the segments into clusters with similar dynamics. Age-related changes in dynamical non-stationarity were described in terms of the number of stationary states and the duration of the stationary segments. We found that the EEG signal became more non-stationary with age. Specifically, the number of states increased whereas the mean duration of the stationary segment decreased with age. These two effects had global and parieto-occipital distribution, respectively, with the later effect being most dominant in the alpha (around 10 Hz) frequency band.
authors.affiliation: Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Centre, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. vvakorin@research.baycrest.org
authors.forename: Vasily A
authors.initials: VA
authors.lastname: Vakorin
authors.forename: Anthony R
authors.initials: AR
authors.lastname: McIntosh
authors.forename: Bratislav
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Mišić
authors.forename: Olga
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Krakovska
authors.forename: Catherine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Poulsen
authors.forename: Kristina
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Martinu
authors.forename: Tomáš
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Paus
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000367:Age Factors; D000513:Alpha Rhythm; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D002648:Child; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation