The rate of transient beta frequency events predicts behavior across tasks and species
- Brown University, United States
Abstract
Beta oscillations (15-29Hz) are among the most prominent signatures of brain activity. Beta power is predictive of healthy and abnormal behaviors, including perception, attention and motor action. In non-averaged signals, beta can emerge as transient high-power 'events'. As such, functionally relevant differences in averaged power across time and trials can reflect changes in event number, power, duration, and / or frequency span. We show that functionally relevant differences in averaged beta power in primary somatosensory neocortex reflect a difference in the number of high-power beta events per trial, i.e. event rate. Further, beta events occurring close to the stimulus were more likely to impair perception. These results are consistent across detection and attention tasks in human magnetoencephalography, and in local field potentials from mice performing a detection task. These results imply that an increased propensity of beta events predicts the failure to effectively transmit information through specific neocortical representations.
Data availability
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Data from: The rate of transient beta frequency events predicts behavior across tasks and speciesAvailable at Dryad Digital Repository under a CC0 Public Domain Dedication.
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Author details
Funding
National Institute of Mental Health (R01MH106174)
- Stephanie R Jones
Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administration, Office of Research and Development, Rehabilitation Research and Development Service (N9228-C)
- Stephanie R Jones
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (R01NS045130)
- Christopher I Moore
Brown Institute for Brain Science
- Hyeyoung Shin
Fulbright Association
- Hyeyoung Shin
National Science Foundation Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience (NSF CRCNS-1131850)
- Stephanie R Jones
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All experimental procedures and animal care protocols were approved by Brown University Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees and were in accordance with US National Institutes of Health guidelines. All surgery was performed under isofluorane anesthesia, and every effort was made to minimize suffering.
Human subjects: All MEG experimental protocols were approved by the Massachusetts General Hospital Internal Review Board, and each subject gave informed consent before data acquisition.
Copyright
This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
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The rate of transient beta frequency events predicts behavior across tasks and species
eLife 6:e29086.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.29086
