Assessing the coupling between local neural activity and global connectivity fluctuations: Application to human...

Cognitive-relevant information is processed by different brain areas that cooperate to eventually produce a response. The relationship between local activity and global brain states during such processes, however, remains for the most part unexplored. To address this question, we designed a simple face-recognition task performed in patients with drug-resistant epilepsy and monitored with intracranial electroencephalography (EEG). Based on our observations, we developed a novel analytical framework (named "local-global" framework) to statistically correlate the brain activity in every recorded gray-matter region with the widespread connectivity fluctuations as proxy to identify concurrent local activations and global brain phenomena that may plausibly reflect a common functional network during cognition. The application of the local-global framework to the data from three subjects showed that similar connectivity fluctuations found across patients were mainly coupled to the local activity of brain areas involved in face information processing. In particular, our findings provide preliminary evidence that the reported global measures might be a novel signature of functional brain activity reorganization when a stimulus is processed in a task context regardless of the specific recorded areas.