Linking neural activity to sensory, motor or cognitive processes is an ongoing goal in Neuroscience and articular attention has been devoted to the role of brain oscillations, analyzed by averaging over many trials in suitably designed tasks. Previous findings offer a glimpse of the complexity of the overall picture, but have also limitations. First, searching for univocal correspondences between specific sensory, motor or cognitive processes and specific space-frequency-time oscillatory activities may well be suboptimal and give fragmentary descriptions. Second, and perhaps even more fundamentally, interpretations regarding the specific functional roles of features identified in average data may be questionable because these features may not even exist in the individual trials, displaying a huge variability typically dismissed as noise.
In our preprint with Nicole Malfait (Marseille), we show that sensorimotor behavior can be reliably predicted from single-trial EEG oscillations if we consider their coordination patterns across space, time and frequency, rather than looking at individual oscillatory components one-by-one.
We define high-dimensional oscillatory portraits to capture the interdependence between basic oscillatory elements, quantifying oscillations occurring in single-trials at specific frequencies, locations and time epochs. We find that the general structure of the element-interdependence networks (effective connectivity) remains stable across task conditions, reflecting an intrinsic coordination architecture and responds to changes in task constraints by subtle but consistently distinct topological reorganizations. Trial categories are reliably and significantly better separated using oscillatory portraits, than from the information contained in individual oscillatory elements, suggesting an inter-element coordination-based encoding.
Furthermore, single-trial oscillatory portrait fluctuations are predictive of fine trial-to-trial variations in movement kinematics. Remarkably, movement accuracy appears to be reflected in the capacity of the oscillatory coordination architecture to flexibly update as an effect of movement-error integration.
To know more:
- Bahuguna, J., Schwey, A., Battaglia, D., and Malfait, N. (2025). Interdependence patterns of multifrequency oscillations predict visuomotor behavior. Netw. Neurosci., 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1162/netn_a_00440.
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