Schedule of Events | Symposia

Changes in Alpha Spectral Events with Age and Prenatal Exposure to Alcohol

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Donovan Roberts¹ (droberts@mrn.org), Falicha Candelaria-Cook², Debora Mun³, Orin Myers⁴, Megan Schendel⁵, Maryam Alsameen⁶, Pilar Sanjuan⁷, Cassandra Cerros⁸, Dina Hill⁹, Julia Stephen¹⁰; ¹The Mind Research Network

This poster covers how age and prenatal alcohol exposure affect alpha spectral events. Prior studies on alpha oscillations focused on mean power, which inherently neglects the transient, rhythmic nature of oscillatory activity. Our study characterized alpha events using four constituent variables: amplitude of event, frequency span of the event, duration of the event, and number of events. We measured resting-state magnetoencephalography in 135 participants aged 4 to 12 years. The resting-state data from the 82 typically developing controls and 53 children exposed to alcohol prenatally were analyzed to find which of the four variables of alpha events was correlated most strongly with mean power between groups and how these parameters might change with age and by group. Investigating at age effects, discovered that both groups have a decrease in mean event duration as they age, and increased correlation between mean power and mean event frequency span with increasing age, but the exposed group had a negative correlation between mean event duration and increasing age. When examining group differences, we found a positive correlation between mean event duration and mean alpha power in the control group and a negative correlation between mean event frequency span and mean alpha power in the exposed group. These results reveal a complex interplay between the constituent variables associated with alpha events and mean alpha power that change with age and prenatal exposure to alcohol. Examining alpha spectral events is critical to understanding the underlying mechanisms related to neural oscillations in typical and atypical child development.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Development & aging