Electrophysiological Frequency Band Ratio Measures Conflate Periodic and Aperiodic Neural Activity

By Thomas Donoghue, J. Dominguez, Bradley Voytek. 2020

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Signal Processing

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Signal Processing

Citations in the corpus

Aperiodic neural timescales in prefrontal cortex dilate with increased task abstraction (2025, unknown): “…oscillations with motor-related beta oscillatory power (28,51,52) and low-frequency coupling with posterior alpha power (53), these findings might be confounded with changes in the power of low-frequency aperiodic activity such as the lengthening of timescales found in the present study (49,54).”
Characterization of aperiodic and theta activity in preterm infants using EEG: Insights into cerebral maturation and inter-individual variability (2026, unknown): “However, traditional spectral power measures (e.g., absolute power) mix oscillatory and non-oscillatory background neural activity (Donoghue et al., 2020).”
Relating ADHD to the aperiodic component of the EEG signal in both males and females across development (2026, unknown): “…to traditional band-limited metrics of absolute or relative power (e.g., theta/beta ratio), which confounded aperiodic and periodic activity (Donoghue et al., 2020a; Finley et al., 2022), and were until recently widely used, yet unreliable, markers of ADHD (Arns et al., 2013; Loo and…”
Revolutionizing Pediatric Neurophysiology With Magnetoencephalography (2026, unknown): “…to parameterize the RS power spectrum in order to accurately characterize RS maturational changes separately for aperiodic and periodic power (Donoghue, Dominguez, and Voytek 2020; Ostlund et al. 2022; He et al. 2019), with power values in brain space preferred to those in sensor space…”
Resting-state periodic and aperiodic brain oscillations from birth to preschool years: Aperiodic maturity predicts developmental course (2026, unknown): “A growing literature relies on the ‘spec-param ’ toolbox (Donoghue, 2020; Ostlund, 2022) to separately param-eterize periodic and aperiodic activity (Donoghue et al., 2020; Ostlund, 2022; He et al., 2019).”
Confirmation of a Useful Dark‐Room Resting‐State Procedure: Periodic and Aperiodic MEG Activity in Children (2026, unknown): “As detailed in specparam method papers (Donoghue, Haller, et al. 2020; Donoghue, Dominguez, and Voytek 2020; Ostlund et al. 2022), outputs of the specparam algorithm include the offset and exponent values of the aperiodic signal and the bandwidth, power, and center frequencies of the identified…”
Exploring Background Aperiodic Electroencephalography (EEG) Activity in the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (2024, unknown): “…that developmental changes in aperiodic activity may represent adaptive or maladaptive transitions that occur in the human brain, be they age-related, sex-related, or characteristic of neurodevelopmental disorders (Donoghue, Dominguez, & Voytek, 2020; Donoghue, Haller, et al., 2020; B. J.”
The development of aperiodic and periodic resting-state power between early childhood and adulthood: New insights from optically pumped magnetometers (2024, background): “On the other hand, while age-related changes in neural oscillations have been well characterised (e.g., Ebersole and Pedley, 2003), traditional analyses of neural oscillations within canonical frequency bands can be confounded by aperiodic activity (Donoghue, Dominguez, et al., 2020).”
Theta activity and cognitive functioning: Integrating evidence from resting-state and task-related developmental electroencephalography (EEG) research (2024, background): “Moreover, aperiodic activity has been shown to better explain individual differences in theta/beta ratio (Donoghue, Dominguez, et al., 2020) and predict ADHD status in children (Robertson et al., 2019; see also Kar-alunas et al., 2022; Ostlund et al., 2021) than does power within individual…”
Aperiodic EEG and 7T MRSI evidence for maturation of E/I balance supporting the development of working memory through adolescence (2024, result): “In parallel, the amplitude of the spectra, assessed by the aperiodic offset parameter, is associated with neural spike rates (Waschke et al., 2021; Donoghue et al., 2020b), supported by intracranial LFP recordings that have shown increases in broadband LFP power associated with neuronal population…”
Evaluating early EEG correlates of restricted and repetitive behaviors for toddlers with or without autism (2024, background): “Separating out periodic and aperiodic components enhances precise estimation of periodic activity, including measures of peak alpha amplitude (PAA) and PAF [32, 33].”
Early development of electrophysiological activity: contribution of periodic and aperiodic components of the EEG signal (2022, methodology): “…components of the aperiodic signal increased with age in our study, which contrasts with previous studies in infants and children and our initial hypothesis (e.g., Cellier et al., 2021; Schaworonkow, & Voytek, 2021; Hill et al., 2022; Voytek, 2015; Donoghue et al., 2020a; McSweeney et al., 2021).”