Aging-related changes of EEG synchronization during a visual working memory task
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Published on: May 11, 2020
Chaolin Teng1, Yao Cheng1, Chao Wang1
11The Key Laboratory of Biomedical Information Engineering of Ministry of Education, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, School of Life Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, 710049 Shaanxi Province People's Republic of China.
Abstract:
Differences of EEG synchronization between normal old and young people during a working memory (WM) task were investigated. The synchronization likelihood (SL) is a novel method to assessed synchronization in multivariate time series for non-stationary systems. To evaluate this method to study the mechanisms of WM, we calculated the SL values in brain electrical activity for both resting state and task state. EEG signals were recorded from 14 young adults and 12 old adults during two different states, respectively. SL was used to measure EEG synchronization between 19 electrodes in delta, theta, alpha1, alpha2 and beta frequency bands. Bad task performance and significantly decreased EEG synchronization were found in old group compared to young group in alpha1, alpha2 and beta frequency bands during the WM task. Moreover, significantly decreased EEG synchronization in beta band in the elder was also detected during the resting state. The findings suggested that reduced EEG synchronization may be one of causes for WM capacity decline along with healthy aging.
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