Decomposing alpha and 1/f brain activities reveals their differential associations with cognitive processing speed

By G. Ouyang, Andrea Hildebrandt, Florian Schmitz, Christoph S. Herrmann. 2020

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

The development of aperiodic neural activity in the human brain (2024, unknown): “By contrast, flatter slopes have been associated with slower processing speed 74 , and poorer visual working 8 and visuomotor 80 memory, although these studies analysed task-free slopes.”
Relating ADHD to the aperiodic component of the EEG signal in both males and females across development (2026, unknown): “…shown to vary with age (Cellier et al., 2021; Hill et al., 2022; McSweeney et al., 2021; Stanyard et al., 2024), task demands (Arnett et al., 2022; Ouyang et al., 2020), various neurodevelopmental differences, including ADHD (Pani et al., 2022), and likely the interaction between these factors.”
Resting-state EEG correlates of sustained attention in healthy ageing: Cross-sectional findings from the LEISURE study. (2024, background): “In addition, recent studies have identified links between aperiodic activity and cognition, specifically cognitive speed (Ouyang et al., 2020), lexical prediction (Dave et al., 2018) working memory (Donoghue et al., 2020; Thuwal et al., 2021; Voytek et al., 2015) and interference (Ka ł ama ł a et…”
Alterations in aperiodic and periodic EEG activity in young children with Down syndrome (2024, unknown): “…type 1 (Carter Leno et al., 2022), and ADHD (Robertson et al., 2019; Ostlund et al., 2021), and changes in aperiodic slope have been associated with behavioral inhibition (Ostlund et al., 2022), cognition (Pathania et al., 2022; Ouyang et al., 2020), and language learning (Cross et al., 2022).”
Theta activity and cognitive functioning: Integrating evidence from resting-state and task-related developmental electroencephalography (EEG) research (2024, result): “Consistent with this idea, a recent study found that the association between resting alpha power and cognitive processing speed in adults was better accounted for by aperiodic activity than by aperiodic-adjusted alpha power (Ouyang et al., 2020).”
Alterations in aperiodic and periodic EEG activity in young children with Down syndrome (2024, unknown): “…type 1 (Carter Leno et al., 2022), and ADHD (Robertson et al., 2019; Ostlund et al., 2021), and changes in aperiodic slope have been associated with behavioral inhibition (Ostlund et al., 2022), cognition (Pathania et al., 2022; Ouyang et al., 2020), and language learning (Cross et al., 2022).”
Age-Related Characteristics of Resting-State Electroencephalographic Signals and the Corresponding Analytic Approaches: A Review (2024, background): “First, aging slows the frequency of the alpha rhythm in EEG signals, which has been closely associated with a decline in cognitive performance and slower information-processing speed [108,165].”
Aperiodic EEG and 7T MRSI evidence for maturation of E/I balance supporting the development of working memory through adolescence (2024, background): “…activity has also been associated with behavioral performance across a variety of cognitive tasks (Donoghue et al., 2020a; Podvalny et al., 2015; Ouyang et al., 2020), including a reduction in the aperiodic exponent during visuomotor and object recognition tasks relative to baseline (Podvalny…”
Neurophysiological mechanisms of cognition in the developing brain: Insights from intracranial EEG studies (2023, background): “Several studies have demonstrated that the aperiodic component is modulated by different cognitive tasks (e.g., Cross et al., 2022; Ouyang et al., 2020; Sheehan et al., 2018; Virtue-Griffiths et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2023) and differs with development (Cellier et al.”
Periodic and Aperiodic EEG Features as Potential Markers of Developmental Dyslexia (2023, background): “, working memory, short-term memory, processing speed, auditory processing) [28,31,33,42,44].”
Time-resolved parameterization of aperiodic and periodic brain activity (2022, unknown): “…can be decomposed into low-dimensional aperiodic and periodic components (Donoghue et al., 2020), and that these latter are physiologically (Gao et al., 2019), clinically (Molina et al., 2020; Van Heumen et al., 2021), and behaviourally (Ouyang et al., 2020; Waschke et al., 2021) meaningful.”
Periodic and aperiodic neural activity displays age-dependent changes across early-to-middle childhood (2021, background): “For example, recent work has identified aperiodic activity as a predictor of working memory performance (Donoghue et al., 2020b) and cognitive processing speed (Ouyang et al., 2020).”
Separating Neural Oscillations from Aperiodic 1/f Activity: Challenges and Recommendations (2021, unknown): “For example, the 1/f exponent was shown to change with task (Ouyang et al., 2020; Podvalny et al., 2015; Waschke et al., 2021), age (Bódizs et al.”
Linking the multiple-demand cognitive control system to human electrophysiological activity (2025, unknown): “…et al., 2019), psychiatric diseases such as ADHD (Robertson et al., 2019) and schizophrenia (Molina et al., 2020), and various aspects of cognitive performance (Canales-Johnson et al., 2021; Churchill et al., 2016; Gyurkovics et al., 2022; He, 2014; Kardan et al., 2020; Ouyang et al., 2020).”