Informativeness of Auditory Stimuli Does Not Affect EEG Signal Diversity

Bola, Michał; Orłowski, Paweł; Baranowska, Karolina; Schartner, Michael; Marchewka, Artur

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01820

Cited by 7 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 63 publications

(97 reference statements)

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“…In line with this, Mensen and colleagues 33 found that the diversity of EEG-evoked responses was higher when participants saw natural, meaningful images in comparison to artificially generated, meaningless ones. However, in our previous study, in which we used auditory stimuli that varied in terms of information rate and meaningfulness, we found no effect of such manipulation on EEG signal diversity 34 . Relatedly, several studies have compared the diversity of continuous electrophysiological signals recorded during active perception and the resting state: data from three studies indicated that visual perception was related to greater signal diversity than the resting state 21 , 31 , 35 , but three studies investigating auditory perception found it was related to lower diversity in comparison to the resting state 21 , 34 , 35 .…”

Section: Introductioncontrasting

confidence: 56%

Sensory modality defines the relation between EEG Lempel–Ziv diversity and meaningfulness of a stimulus

Orłowski

Bola

2023

Sci Rep

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Diversity of brain activity is a robust neural correlate of global states of consciousness. It has been proposed that diversity measures specifically reflect the temporal variability of conscious experience. Previous studies supported this hypothesis by showing that perception of meaningful visual stimuli causes richer, more-variable experiences than perception of meaningless stimuli, and this is reflected in greater brain signal diversity. To investigate whether this relation is consistent across sensory modalities, to participants we presented three versions of naturalistic visual and auditory stimuli (videos and audiobooks) that varied in the amount of meaning (original, scrambled, and noise), while recording electroencephalographic signals. We report three main findings. First, greater meaningfulness of visual stimuli was related to higher Lempel–Ziv diversity of EEG signals, but the opposite effect was found in the auditory modality. Second, visual perception was related to generally higher EEG diversity than auditory perception. Third, perception of meaningful visual stimuli and auditory stimuli respectively resulted in higher and lower EEG diversity in comparison to the resting state. In conclusion, the signal diversity of continuous brain signals depends on the stimulated sensory modality, therefore it is not a generic index of the variability of conscious experience.

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Section: Introductioncontrasting

confidence: 56%

Sensory modality defines the relation between EEG Lempel–Ziv diversity and meaningfulness of a stimulus

Orłowski

Bola

2023

Sci Rep

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“…There was no significant correlation between posterior LZC and subjective scores of dream experience diversity and vividness. While some promising results in this direction have been reported earlier, particularly in studies of psychedelics ( Schartner et al, 2017a ; Timmermann et al, 2019 ) and “meaningfulness” of presented stimuli ( Boly et al, 2015 ), LZC has also been found to be unresponsive to the information rate of auditory stimuli ( Bola et al, 2018 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

“…It is not yet clear whether signal diversity measures are able to do this. For example, while Timmermann et al (2019) observed that the variation in LZC over time mirrored the self-reported intensity of the ongoing psychedelic experience, Bola et al (2018) found LZC to be unaffected by the presentation rate of audio stimuli (recordings of book excerpts).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

EEG Lempel-Ziv complexity varies with sleep stage, but does not seem to track dream experience

Aamodt

Nilsen

Markhus

et al. 2023

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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In a recent electroencephalography (EEG) sleep study inspired by complexity theories of consciousness, we found that multi-channel signal diversity progressively decreased from wakefulness to slow wave sleep, but failed to find any significant difference between dreaming and non-dreaming awakenings within the same sleep stage (NREM2). However, we did find that multi-channel Lempel-Ziv complexity (LZC) measured over the posterior cortex increased with more perceptual ratings of NREM2 dream experience along a thought-perceptual axis. In this follow-up study, we re-tested our previous findings, using a slightly different approach. Partial sleep-deprivation was followed by evening sleep experiments, with repeated awakenings and immediate dream reports. Participants reported whether they had been dreaming, and were asked to rate how diverse, vivid, perceptual, and thought-like the contents of their dreams were. High density (64 channel) EEG was recorded throughout the experiment, and mean single-channel LZC was calculated for each 30 s sleep epoch. LZC progressively decreased with depth of non-REM sleep. Surprisingly, estimated marginal mean LZC was slightly higher for NREM1 than for wakefulness, but the difference did not remain significant after adjusting for multiple comparisons. We found no significant difference in LZC between dream and non-dream awakenings, nor any significant relationship between LZC and subjective ratings of dream experience, within the same sleep stage (NREM2). The failure to reproduce our own previous finding of a positive correlation between posterior LZC and more perceptual dream experiences, or to find any other correlation between brain signal complexity and subjective experience within NREM2 sleep, raises the question of whether EEG LZC is really a reliable correlate of richness of experience as such, within the same sleep stage.

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“…This was despite the fact that in all three conditions (movie, TV noise and scrambled movie), each stimulus was equally as differentiated in terms of low-level perceptual content. A similar study conducted in the auditory domain in EEG data, using normal speech at two different speeds and backwards speech, did not find a difference between these conditions ( Bola et al. 2018 ), although the difference in meaningful information content between these two conditions, which was assumed to be higher for the coherent speech than for the incomprehensible backwards speech, may not be sufficient to differentiate them in neural data.…”

Section: Resting-state Neural Complexity and Dimensions Of Consciousnessmentioning

confidence: 86%

Consciousness as a multidimensional phenomenon: implications for the assessment of disorders of consciousness

Walter

2021

Neuroscience of Consciousness

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Disorders of consciousness (DoCs) pose a significant clinical and ethical challenge because they allow for complex forms of conscious experience in patients where intentional behaviour and communication are highly limited or non-existent. There is a pressing need for brain-based assessments that can precisely and accurately characterize the conscious state of individual DoC patients. There has been an ongoing research effort to develop neural measures of consciousness. However, these measures are challenging to validate not only due to our lack of ground truth about consciousness in many DoC patients but also because there is an open ontological question about consciousness. There is a growing, well-supported view that consciousness is a multidimensional phenomenon that cannot be fully described in terms of the theoretical construct of hierarchical, easily ordered conscious levels. The multidimensional view of consciousness challenges the utility of levels-based neural measures in the context of DoC assessment. To examine how these measures may map onto consciousness as a multidimensional phenomenon, this article will investigate a range of studies where they have been applied in states other than DoC and where more is known about conscious experience. This comparative evidence suggests that measures of conscious level are more sensitive to some dimensions of consciousness than others and cannot be assumed to provide a straightforward hierarchical characterization of conscious states. Elevated levels of brain complexity, for example, are associated with conscious states characterized by a high degree of sensory richness and minimal attentional constraints, but are suboptimal for goal-directed behaviour and external responsiveness. Overall, this comparative analysis indicates that there are currently limitations to the use of these measures as tools to evaluate consciousness as a multidimensional phenomenon and that the relationship between these neural signatures and phenomenology requires closer scrutiny.

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Informativeness of Auditory Stimuli Does Not Affect EEG Signal Diversity

Cited by 7 publications

References 63 publications

Sensory modality defines the relation between EEG Lempel–Ziv diversity and meaningfulness of a stimulus

Sensory modality defines the relation between EEG Lempel–Ziv diversity and meaningfulness of a stimulus

EEG Lempel-Ziv complexity varies with sleep stage, but does not seem to track dream experience

Consciousness as a multidimensional phenomenon: implications for the assessment of disorders of consciousness

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