ArticleeLife2025
Modulation of aperiodic EEG activity provides sensitive index of cognitive state changes during working memory task.
Article in eLife, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Changes in Aperiodic (1/f Slope) Activity During a Picture-Word Interference Task: Effects of Congruency and Sequence Manipulations.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Resting-state electroretinography reveals pathological retinal oscillations in retinitis pigmentosa mice and patients.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Revisiting post-stimulus theta activity: evidence for an aperiodic rather than oscillatory origin.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Time-frequency-spatial channel attention network for semantic decoding: an exploratory EEG study.Medical & biological engineering & computing · 2026Article
- Spectral and non-spectral EEG measures in the prediction of working memory task performance and psychopathology.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Scale-Free Neurodynamics as Functional Fingerprint of Brain Regions.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Dissociating Contributions of Theta and Alpha Oscillations from Aperiodic Neural Activity in Human Visual Working Memory.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- The Relationship Between Task-Related Aperiodic EEG Activity, Neural Inefficiency and Verbal Working Memory in Younger and Older Adults.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Changes in aperiodic (1/bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Functional Connectivity Is Dominated by Aperiodic, Rather Than Oscillatory, Coupling.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Linking the multiple-demand cognitive control system to human electrophysiological activity.Neuropsychologia · 2025Review
- Neural signatures of recollection are sensitive to memory quality and specific event features.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Distinct and complementary mechanisms of oscillatory and aperiodic alpha activity in visuospatial attention.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Aperiodic EEG signatures: unveiling the interplay between APOE ε4 and mild cognitive impairment subtypes.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2025Article
- Aperiodic and oscillatory systems underpinning human domain-general cognition.Communications biology · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
To better understand cognitive processes, it is valuable to consider both periodic (oscillatory) and aperiodic electrophysiological brain activity. The aim of this study was to clarify how the periodic and aperiodic electrophysiological components reflect the cognitive processes involved in working memory. Fifty-seven human participants performed an n-back task while their brain activity was recorded using EEG. The analysis of both components of the EEG spectrum during task performance indicates that both periodic and aperiodic activities exhibit distinct task-related spatiotemporal dynamics that are closely related to cognitive demands. The results suggest that a substantial portion of the changes often attributed to theta oscillations in working memory tasks may be influenced by shifts in the spectral slope of aperiodic activity. This finding indicates that the modulation of aperiodic activity, associated with cognitive control processes, could provide a more sensitive index of cognitive state changes than previously recognised. To further confirm our findings, we also used these analysis methods in an item-recognition task, which showed similar patterns of periodic and aperiodic activity. These observations challenge the conventional understanding of low-frequency oscillations in cognitive processing and raise concerns about the routine practice of EEG baseline correction in time-frequency analysis, as it may obscure significant modulations in continuous working memory tasks. Consequently, the inclusion of aperiodic activity as a fundamental component of EEG analysis is likely to be critical for the accurate representation of the neural basis of cognition.
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