ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2015
Age-Related Changes in 1/f Neural Electrophysiological Noise.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 402 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
402 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- A Systematic Review of Aperiodic Neural Activity in Clinical Investigations.The European journal of neuroscience · 2025Pooled it
- Aperiodic and Hurst EEG exponents across early human brain development: A systematic review.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2024Pooled it
- A Single Session of Slackline Training Induces Rapid, Task-Specific Balance Improvements and Elevated Resting-State Beta Band Power.European journal of sport science · 2026Trial
- Investigating the feasibility and safety of transcranial infraslow gray noise stimulation as a potential treatment for generalized anxiety disorder.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- A pilot study on the effects of olfactory stimulation with white musk aromatic oil on psychophysiological activity: a crossover study.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- A pilot safety and tolerability study of scanning ultrasound as a neuromodulation therapy in Alzheimer's disease.Brain communications · 2025Trial
- Article
- Robust and replicable effects of ageing on resting-state brain electrophysiology measured with MEG.eLife · 2026Article
- Behavioral variability and preparatory ERPs as neurobehavioral markers of mild cognitive impairment risk in older adults.GeroScience · 2026Article
- Baseline Dynamics and Sleep Loss-Driven Changes of Electrocorticographic Aperiodic Properties Are Altered in Mice Lacking Neuroligin-2.The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Article
- Shared Spectral Parameters Between EEG and Basal Ganglia LFP Distinguish Sleep-Specific Oscillations in Parkinson's Disease.European journal of neurology · 2026Article
- Peak alpha frequency and spectral exponent in postoperative delirium: a high-density EEG cohort study.BJA open · 2026Article
- Preserved topography, lateralization, selectivity, and functional connectivity of the language network in older brains.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Beyond neural oscillations: Stress-related aperiodic activity and aperiodic-oscillatory spectral covariation.iScience · 2026Article
- Spontaneous changes in the prestimulus alpha power predict both objective and subjective aspects of perception-evidence from 4 paradigms and 471 experimental sessions.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Potential mechanisms and functional significance of aperiodic neural activity.Nature human behaviour · 2026Review
- Changes in Aperiodic (1/f Slope) Activity During a Picture-Word Interference Task: Effects of Congruency and Sequence Manipulations.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Task-Related Aperiodic EEG (1/f) Activity in Autism.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2026Article
- Signatures of Covert Neuron Loss in the Local Field Potential of Motor Cortex.Journal of the American Heart Association · 2026Article
- Long-term reliability and stability of parameterized resting state EEG: evidence from a five-year follow-up.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
342 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Aging is associated with performance decrements across multiple cognitive domains. The neural noise hypothesis, a dominant view of the basis of this decline, posits that aging is accompanied by an increase in spontaneous, noisy baseline neural activity. Here we analyze data from two different groups of human subjects: intracranial electrocorticography from 15 participants over a 38 year age range (15-53 years) and scalp EEG data from healthy younger (20-30 years) and older (60-70 years) adults to test the neural noise hypothesis from a 1/f noise perspective. Many natural phenomena, including electrophysiology, are characterized by 1/f noise. The defining characteristic of 1/f is that the power of the signal frequency content decreases rapidly as a function of the frequency (f) itself. The slope of this decay, the noise exponent (χ), is often <-1 for electrophysiological data and has been shown to approach white noise (defined as χ = 0) with increasing task difficulty. We observed, in both electrophysiological datasets, that aging is associated with a flatter (more noisy) 1/f power spectral density, even at rest, and that visual cortical 1/f noise statistically mediates age-related impairments in visual working memory. These results provide electrophysiological support for the neural noise hypothesis of aging. Significance statement: Understanding the neurobiological origins of age-related cognitive decline is of critical scientific, medical, and public health importance, especially considering the rapid aging of the world's population. We find, in two separate human studies, that 1/f electrophysiological noise increases with aging. In addition, we observe that this age-related 1/f noise statistically mediates age-related working memory decline. These results significantly add to this understanding and contextualize a long-standing problem in cognition by encapsulating age-related cognitive decline within a neurocomputational model of 1/f noise-induced deficits in neural communication.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.