ERP-based cognitive load decoding in middle-aged adults: effects of Alzheimer's risk

Middle-aged people generally experience greater work pressure but higher health risks. However, the existing EEG-based cognitive load monitoring research has paid less attention to this segment of the population. We investigated high temporal resolution decoding of cognitive load from EEG signals in middle-aged individuals during inhibition and updating tasks. In this paper, we employed publicly available EEG data from Multi-Source Interference Task (MSIT) and Sternberg Memory Task (STMT) paradigms to examine variations in brain activation modes and cognitive load under low and high cognitive demands. This analysis was conducted using time courses of event-related potential (ERP) scalp maps. To validate the effect of the method, we conducted multivariate pattern recognition and statistics analysis. The point-by-point classification accuracy sequences obtained from decoding were assessed for significance above chance levels using one-tailed t-tests, with corrections for multiple comparisons made via the false discovery rate (FDR) method. After comparative analysis, we found that the decoder was more effective in categorizing different tasks, while the MSIT was better than STMT's in categorizing cognitive loads. In addition, we also analyzed the spatio-temporal properties of brain activation under different conditions, which is instrumental in developing more powerful classifiers. Additionally, group-level statistical comparisons were performed to explore how AD risk may influence cognitive load decodings. The study results show that this program is feasible and can be used in the future to monitor the workload of high-risk job operators in real time and longitudinal observation in medical diagnostics.