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Event-Related Variability is Modulated by Task and Development

Shruti Naik, Parvaneh Adibpour, Jessica Dubois, Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, Battaglia Demian

Date / Location: Sunday, 10 July 2022 / S01-136
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In carefully designed experiments, cognitive scientists interpret mean event-related potentials (ERP) in terms of cognitive operations. However, the huge signal variability from one trial to the next, questions the representability of such mean events. Here we explored whether this variability is an unwanted noise, or an informative part of the neural response. We took advantage of the rapid changes in the visual system during human infancy and analyzed the variability of visual responses to central and lateralized faces in 2-to 6-month-old infants and adults using high-density electroencephalography (EEG). We observed that that the effects of stimulus on the spontaneous background fluctuations is only "modulatory'' rather than determinant. I.e. Neural trajectories of individual trials always remain very far from ERP components, only moderately bending their direction with a substantial temporal jitter across trials. In infants nonetheless, the temporal structure of these weak modulations depend on the difficulty of the task at hand possibly dependent on the top-down attention at this age. Dynamical systems interpretation of these results allows us to suggest that the Event-Related Potential (ERP) components act as weakly attracting modes of a low-dimensional energy landscape in which neural trajectories are transiently constrained due to stimulus arrival.However, single trial trajectories displayed characteristic patterns of acceleration and deceleration when approaching ERP components, as if they were under the active influence of steering forces causing transient attraction and stabilization. Our approaches to characterize Event Related Variability (ERV) allows more faithful description of ERPs in terms of brain state kinematics of neural trajectories.

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