ArticleNeuroImage2020
Distinguishing cognitive effort and working memory load using scale-invariance and alpha suppression in EEG.
Article in NeuroImage, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Oscillatory alpha and aperiodic neural correlates of visual working memory and attention.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Beyond Neural Noise: Critical Dynamics Predict Slower Reaction Times in Adults With and Without ADHD.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The aperiodic and periodic activities of EEG dynamically relate with cognitive performance in schizophrenia.Schizophrenia research. Cognition · 2025Review
- Neural evidence for modality-independent storage in working memory.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- Linking the multiple-demand cognitive control system to human electrophysiological activity.Neuropsychologia · 2025Review
- Zooming in on what counts as core and auxiliary: A case study on recognition models of visual working memory.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- Changes in interpersonal distance modulate social attention engagement: evidence from EEG alpha band suppression.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Cognitive load impairs athletes' subliminal processing: behavioral and neural insights.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Broadscale dampening of uncertainty adjustment in the aging brain.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Dysfunctional Alpha Modulation as a Mechanism of Working Memory Impairment in Serious Mental Illness.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2024Article
- Working Memory Workload When Making Complex Decisions: A Behavioral and EEG Study.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 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
- Effects of Game-Related Tasks for the Diagnosis and Classification of Gaming Disorder.Biosensors · 2024Article
- 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
- Multifractal test for nonlinearity of interactions across scales in time series.Behavior research methods · 2023Article
- Comparative analysis of multifaceted neural effects associated with varying endogenous cognitive load.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Effortfulness of visual working memory: Gauged by physical exertion.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2023Article
- Economic Choice and Heart Rate Fractal Scaling Indicate That Cognitive Effort Is Reduced by Depression and Boosted by Sad Mood.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2023Article
- Article
- Cognitive training, but not EEG-neurofeedback, improves working memory in healthy volunteers.Brain communications · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Despite being intuitive, cognitive effort has proven difficult to define quantitatively. Here, we proposed to study cognitive effort by investigating the degree to which the brain deviates from its default state, where brain activity is scale-invariant. Specifically, we measured such deviations by examining changes in scale-invariance of brain activity as a function of task difficulty and posited suppression of scale-invariance as a proxy for exertion of cognitive effort. While there is some fMRI evidence supporting this proposition, EEG investigations on the matter are scant, despite the EEG signal being more suitable for analysis of scale invariance (i.e., having a much broader frequency range). In the current study we validated the correspondence between scale-invariance (H) of cortical activity recorded by EEG and task load during two working memory (WM) experiments with varying set sizes. Then, we used this neural signature to disentangle cognitive effort from the number of items stored in WM within participants. Our results showed monotonic decreases in H with increased set size, even after set size exceeded WM capacity. This behavior of H contrasted with behavioral performance and an oscillatory indicator of WM load (i.e., alpha-band desynchronization), both of which showed a plateau at difficulty levels surpassing WM capacity. This is the first reported evidence for the suppression of scale-invariance in EEG due to task difficulty, and our work suggests that H suppression may be used to quantify changes in cognitive effort even when working memory load is at maximum capacity.
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