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Aging-related changes of EEG synchronization during a visual working memory task

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Abstract

Differences of EEG synchronization between normal old and young people during a working memory (WM) task were investigated. The synchronization likelihood (SL) is a novel method to assessed synchronization in multivariate time series for non-stationary systems. To evaluate this method to study the mechanisms of WM, we calculated the SL values in brain electrical activity for both resting state and task state. EEG signals were recorded from 14 young adults and 12 old adults during two different states, respectively. SL was used to measure EEG synchronization between 19 electrodes in delta, theta, alpha1, alpha2 and beta frequency bands. Bad task performance and significantly decreased EEG synchronization were found in old group compared to young group in alpha1, alpha2 and beta frequency bands during the WM task. Moreover, significantly decreased EEG synchronization in beta band in the elder was also detected during the resting state. The findings suggested that reduced EEG synchronization may be one of causes for WM capacity decline along with healthy aging.

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Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2017YFB1300303), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 31271061), and the Natural Science Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi Province of China (Program No. 2015JM6289).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Key Laboratory of Biomedical Information Engineering of Ministry of Education, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, School of Life Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, Shaanxi Province, People’s Republic of China

    Chaolin Teng, Yao Cheng, Chao Wang, Weiyong Xu & Jin Xu

  2. Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China

    Yijing Ren

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Weiyong Xu

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  1. Chaolin Teng
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  2. Yao Cheng
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  3. Chao Wang
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  4. Yijing Ren
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  5. Weiyong Xu
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  6. Jin Xu
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Correspondence to Jin Xu.

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Teng, C., Cheng, Y., Wang, C. et al. Aging-related changes of EEG synchronization during a visual working memory task. Cogn Neurodyn 12, 561–568 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-018-9500-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-018-9500-6

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