Comparative analysis of multifaceted neural effects associated with varying endogenous cognitive load

Abstract

Abstract Contemporary neuroscience has firmly established that mental state variation concurs with changes in neural dynamic activity in a complex way that a one-to-one mapping cannot describe. To explore the scenario of the multifaceted changes in neural dynamics associated with simple mental state variation, we took cognitive load – a common cognitive manipulation in psychology – as a venue to characterize how multiple neural dynamic features are simultaneously altered by the manipulation and how their sensitivity differs. Electroencephalogram was collected from 152 participants performing stimulus-free tasks with different demands. The results show that task demand alters wide-ranging neural dynamic features, including band-specific oscillations across broad frequency bands, scale-free dynamics, and cross-frequency phase-amplitude coupling. The scale-free dynamics outperformed others in indexing cognitive load variation. This study demonstrates a complex relationship between cognitive dynamics and neural dynamics, which points to a necessity to integrate multifaceted neural dynamic features when studying mind-brain relationship in the future.