EEG criticality measures of excitation/inhibition balance show that plasticity regulation during wakefulness is distinct from during sleep

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 16, 2024, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Aaron Cochrane¹ (aaron_cochrane@brown.edu), Theodore LaBonte-Clark¹, Kiley Haberkorn¹, Takeo Watanabe¹, Yuka Sasaki¹; ¹Brown University

Visual perception demonstrates adult plasticity in response to experience, yet the neural processes underlying the regulation (metaplasticity) of these changes are only beginning to be understood. One proposal is that excitatory and inhibitory activity is carefully balanced, with the brain typically acting within a narrow critical range to gate neuroplasticity. Such criticality can be computationally defined using time series measures of a signal's self-affinity, and prior work has used EEG recordings to demonstrate these measures' links to pharmacological interventions and to psychological diagnoses. Here we examine the use of EEG criticality measures of excitation and inhibition during visual perceptual training and the consolidation thereof. Participants were sequentially trained on two versions of a texture discrimination task which have been shown to interfere with one another. In contrast to previously reported results linking greater excitation-dominance during REM sleep to higher interference, during awake rest we observed that interference was more likely to occur in the presence of inhibition-dominance in both theta-band (ρ = .47) and alpha-band (ρ = .36). Given the previously-observed role of theta oscillations in executive processing and the reduction of alpha power during sleep, the dissociation we observed may be due to different mechanisms of consolidation occurring during wakefulness as compared to sleep. These results further demonstrate the utility of EEG-based criticality measures of excitation/inhibition balance in understanding the brain’s regulation of its plasticity, with this method of inquiry having the potential to be broadly applicable in the study of plasticity and metaplasticity. Acknowledgements: NIH (R01EY031705, R01EY019466, R01EY027841)

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Vision