Schedule of Events | Symposia

Running out of time: Timescale changes across neurodevelopment

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Olivia Dance¹ (odance@ucsd.edu), Dillan Cellier¹, Bradley Voytek^1,2; ¹University of California, San Diego, ²Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute

Neural timescales capture the stochasticity or relative stability of a neural signal over time, and are thought to reflect the brain’s integration of external and internal stimuli. Though neural timescales have been extensively studied in non-human primates, rodents, and adult humans, research on the trajectory of neural timescales across human development is sparse. Existing literature on aperiodic and oscillatory activity supports a strong hypothesis regarding developmental timescale changes: we predict that neural timescales decrease over development, and that this decrease in timescales will correspond to changes in the aperiodic exponent and oscillatory peak frequencies with age. The current study compares oscillatory and aperiodic metrics of EEG data to the traditional method for measuring neural timescales, the autocorrelation function (ACF). Our investigation uses a cross-sectional dataset of eyes-open and eyes-closed resting state EEG data from the Child Mind Institute from thousands of participants aged 5-21 years old. We extract parameters from the EEG data related to peak frequency and power of oscillatory activity, the slope and offset of the aperiodic signal, and the decay rate of the ACF. In a preliminary analysis of participants ages 6-21, we observed a decrease in neural timescales with increasing age. These findings complemented a concurrent flattening in the aperiodic slope and decrease in offset, replicating the findings of prior studies. Our results highlight the ACF as a powerful metric for understanding timescale changes in neurodevelopment, providing new insights into the relationship between neural activity and behavior across development.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Development & aging