Moment-to-moment signal variability in the human brain can inform models of stochastic facilitation now

The association of physical activity to neural adaptability during visuo-spatial processing in healthy elderly adults: A multiscale entropy analysis

“…Moreover, it might be also likely that, relative to inactive counterparts, these physically active elderly adults were better at using relatively large temporal scale neurophysiological dynamics, in order to deal with varying and unexpected visuo-spatial stimuli. Indeed, the usefulness of EEGbased MSE for exploration in aging pathophysiology has been previously suggested (Garrett, McIntosh, & Grady, 2011). The present findings thus indicate that physical activity may be associated with higher brain signal complexity related to functional and cortical responses, particularly in brain areas that are susceptible to aging (Nyberg et al, 2010).…”

Moment-to-moment brain signal variability: A next frontier in human brain mapping?

“…When noise is too low (inability to detect weak signals) or too high (noise saturates the signal), neural processes remain suboptimal; as a result, SR phenomena are often represented along an inverted U-shaped curve. A broader and more generalizable term that does not depend on signal detection for definition (as SR does) is “stochastic facilitation,” which describes a variety of computational, animal, and human studies in which neural computations simply prove more effective in the presence of stochastic, biologically relevant noise (McDonnell and Ward, 2011; for a brief discussion of possible points of intersection between stochastic facilitation and studies of in vivo brain signal variability, see Garrett et al, 2011a). …”

Decision making in the ageing brain: changes in affective and motivational circuits

“…An independent study using a different task without financial incentives also found increased age-related variability in NAcc and midbrain activity 75 . Although most FMRI studies focus on mean activity, variability may provide an important yet overlooked measure that can also clarify how ageing influences choice 76,77 .…”