Spatiotemporal organization of brain dynamics and intelligence: An EEG study in adolescents

Andrey P. Anokhin, Werner Lutzenberger, Niels Birbaumer

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

115 Scopus citations

Abstract

This study investigated relationships between global dynamics of brain electric activity and intelligence. EEG was recorded monopolarly from 10 symmetric leads (10-20 system) in 37 (17 males) healthy subjects (mean age 13.7 years) at rest and during performance of two visually presented cognitive tasks, verbal (semantic grouping) and spatial (mental rotation). On another occasion, the subjects were administered the Intelligence Structure Test (IST). Both total IST score and some individual subtests of specific abilities showed significant positive correlations with EEG coherence in the theta band and significant negative relationships with EEG dimension, a measure of complexity and unpredictability of neural oscillatory dynamics underlying the EEG time series. Furthermore, EEG coherence and dimensional complexity were inversely related. Taken together, these EEG metrics accounted for over 30% of the variability of the total IST score in this sample. No significant effects of the task type (spatial vs. verbal) or specific abilities were observed. Long-distance theta coherence between frontal and parieto-occipital areas showed the most consistent relationship with cognitive abilities. The results suggest that order to chaos ratio in task-related brain dynamics may be one of the biological factors underlying individual differences in cognitive abilities in adolescents. Copyright (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)259-273
Number of pages15
JournalInternational Journal of Psychophysiology
Volume33
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 1 1999

Keywords

  • Cognitive tasks
  • Coherence
  • Dimensional complexity
  • EEG
  • Intelligence

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