Bastaflex - Mental Flexibility-Stability through the lens of Baseline Brain Activity

contact: Dr. Anoushiravan Zahedi

Our brain constantly compares its predictive models with feedback from reality rather than idly waiting for stimuli. These predictive models should simultaneously be stable to prevent premature prediction abandonment when encountering noise and flexible to get updated based on prediction errors. The current study examines the relationship between cognitive stability-flexibility and baseline brain activity (BBA) using microstates extracted from EEG. Microstates are global patterns of scalp topographies that rapidly and discretely vary over time and can be calculated from resting-state (RS-EEG) and task EEG. Based on a priori power analysis, 100 participants will be recruited who will first undergo RS-EEG and then perform several tasks that measure stability-flexibility while EEG is being recorded. We hypothesize that if BBA can measure an individual's mental stability-flexibility, then the behavioral task performance and task microstates derived from event-related brain potentials (ERPs) should be predictable by RS-microstates. By conducting multilevel Bayesian generalized linear modeling, we will test these hypotheses.