ArticleScientific reports2016
The suppression of scale-free fMRI brain dynamics across three different sources of effort: aging, task novelty and task difficulty.
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed.
- Fractal dynamics of the healthy human brain: A subcortical-to-cortical gradient of temporal complexity.iScience · 2026Article
- Article
- Altered spectral patterns of aperiodic electroencephalography in autism.Psychiatry and clinical neurosciences · 2026Article
- Fractal Analysis of Brain Activity During Risky Drinking in Adolescents and Young Adults.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Genetic contributions to brain criticality and its relationship with human cognitive functions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Linking the multiple-demand cognitive control system to human electrophysiological activity.Neuropsychologia · 2025Review
- Temporal complexity of the BOLD-signal in preterm versus term infants.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Aperiodic EEG Predicts Variability of Visual Temporal Processing.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Assessment of Fractal Synchronization during an Epileptic Seizure.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Individual characteristics outperform resting-state fMRI for the prediction of behavioral phenotypes.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Decreased long-range temporal correlations in the resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging blood-oxygen-level-dependent signal reflect motor sequence learning up to 2 weeks following training.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Resting-state fractal brain connectivity is associated with impaired cognitive performance in healthy aging.GeroScience · 2024Article
- Fingerprints of decreased cognitive performance on fractal connectivity dynamics in healthy aging.GeroScience · 2024Article
- Fractal Time Series: Background, Estimation Methods, and Performances.Advances in neurobiology · 2024Review
- Frequency modulation increases the specificity of time-resolved connectivity: A resting-state fMRI study.Network neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Spatiotemporal dedifferentiation of the global brain signal topography along the adult lifespan.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Temporal Dynamics of Brain Activity Predicting Sense of Agency over Muscle Movements.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Persistent post-COVID headache is associated with suppression of scale-free functional brain dynamics in non-hospitalized individuals.Brain and behavior · 2023Observational
- Comparative analysis of multifaceted neural effects associated with varying endogenous cognitive load.Communications biology · 2023Article
- The fractal brain: scale-invariance in structure and dynamics.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Review
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
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Abstract
There is growing evidence that fluctuations in brain activity may exhibit scale-free ("fractal") dynamics. Scale-free signals follow a spectral-power curve of the form P(f ) ∝ f(-β), where spectral power decreases in a power-law fashion with increasing frequency. In this study, we demonstrated that fractal scaling of BOLD fMRI signal is consistently suppressed for different sources of cognitive effort. Decreases in the Hurst exponent (H), which quantifies scale-free signal, was related to three different sources of cognitive effort/task engagement: 1) task difficulty, 2) task novelty, and 3) aging effects. These results were consistently observed across multiple datasets and task paradigms. We also demonstrated that estimates of H are robust across a range of time-window sizes. H was also compared to alternative metrics of BOLD variability (SDBOLD) and global connectivity (Gconn), with effort-related decreases in H producing similar decreases in SDBOLD and Gconn. These results indicate a potential global brain phenomenon that unites research from different fields and indicates that fractal scaling may be a highly sensitive metric for indexing cognitive effort/task engagement.
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