Exploring Age-Related Changes in Dynamical Non-Stationarity in Electroencephalographic Signals during Early Adolescence

Dynamics of brain signals such as electroencephalogram (EEG) can be characterized as a sequence of quasi-stable patterns. Such patterns in the brain signals can be associated with coordinated neural oscillations, which can be modeled by non-linear systems. Further, these patterns can be quantified through dynamical non-stationarity based on detection of qualitative changes in the state of the systems underlying the observed brain signals. This study explored age-related changes in dynamical non-stationarity of the brain signals recorded at rest, longitudinally with 128-channel EEG during early adolescence (10 to 13 years of age, 56 participants). Dynamical non-stationarity was analyzed based on segmentation of the time series with subsequent grouping of the segments into clusters with similar dynamics. Age-related changes in dynamical non-stationarity were described in terms of the number of stationary states and the duration of the stationary segments. We found that the EEG signal became more non-stationary with age. Specifically, the number of states increased whereas the mean duration of the stationary segment decreased with age. These two effects had global and parieto-occipital distribution, respectively, with the later effect being most dominant in the alpha (around 10 Hz) frequency band.