Plenary talk: Fernando Montani - Characterization of Visuomotor/Imaginary Movements in EEG: An Information Theory and Complex Network Approach

BARAVALLE, ROMAN; NATALI GUISANDE; MAURO GRANADO; OSVALDO A ROSSO; FERNANDO MONTANI

Workshop; International Workshop on Statistical Physics IWoSP 2021; 2021

Imagined activities could actually be a cognitive basis for creative thinking. However, it is still unknownhow they might be related with the architecture of the brain. A recent study has proved the relevance ofthe imagined activity when investigating neuronal diseases by comparing variations in the neuronal activityof patients with brain diseases and healthy subjects. One important aspect of the scientific methodologiesfocused on neuronal diseases is therefore to provide a trustablemethodology that could allow us to distinguishbetween realized and imagined activities in the brain. The electroencephalogram is the result of synchronizedaction of the cerebrum, and our end is portraying the network dynamics through the neuronal responses whenthe subjects perform visuomotor and specific imaginary assignments. We use a subtle information theoreticalapproach accounting for the time causality of the signal and the closeness centrality of the different nodes.More specifically we perform estimations of the probability distribution of the data associated to each nodeusing the Bandt and Pompe approach to account for the causality of the electroencephalographic signals. Wecalculate the Jensen-Shannon distance across different nodes, and then we quantify how fast the informationflow would be through a given node to other nodes computing the closeness centrality.We performa statisticalanalysis to compare the closeness centrality considering the different rhythmic oscillation bands for each nodetaking into account imagined and visuomotor tasks. Our discoveries stress the pertinence of the alpha bandwhile performing and distinguishing the specific imaginary or visuomotor assignments