PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Kusum Thuwal AU - Arpan Banerjee AU - Dipanjan Roy TI - Aperiodic and periodic components of ongoing oscillatory brain dynamics link distinct functional aspects of cognition across adult lifespan AID - 10.1523/ENEURO.0224-21.2021 DP - 2021 Sep 20 TA - eneuro PG - ENEURO.0224-21.2021 4099 - http://www.eneuro.org/content/early/2021/09/17/ENEURO.0224-21.2021.short 4100 - http://www.eneuro.org/content/early/2021/09/17/ENEURO.0224-21.2021.full AB - Signal transmission in the brain propagates via distinct oscillatory frequency bands but the aperiodic component - 1/f activity - almost always co-exists which most of the previous studies have not sufficiently taken into consideration. We used a recently proposed parameterisation model that delimits the oscillatory and aperiodic components of neural dynamics on lifespan ageing data collected from human participants using Magnetoencephalography (MEG). Since, healthy ageing underlines an enormous change in local tissue properties, any systematic relationship of 1/f activity would highlight their impact on the self-organized critical functional states. Furthermore, we have used patterns of correlation between aperiodic background and metrics of behaviour, to understand the domain general effects of 1/f activity. We suggest that age-associated global change in 1/f baseline, alters the functional critical states of the brain affecting the global information processing impacting critically all aspects of cognition e.g., metacognitive awareness, speed of retrieval of memory, cognitive load and accuracy of recall through adult lifespan. This alteration in 1/f crucially impacts the oscillatory features peak frequency and band power ratio, which relates to more local processing and selective functional aspects of cognitive processing during the Visual Short Term Memory (VSTM) task. In summary, this study leveraging on big lifespan data for the first time tracks the cross-sectional lifespan associated periodic and aperiodic dynamical changes in the resting state to demonstrate how normative patterns of 1/f activity, peak frequency and band ratio measures provide distinct functional insights about the cognitive decline through adult lifespan.Significance statementAgeing is accompanied by the decline in cognitive functions and age itself is a major risk factor for Alzheimer’s Disease and other neurological conditions. Our study provides Magnetoencephalogram (MEG) 1/f aperiodic and periodic markers across the healthy adult lifespan and shows that different frequency bands and their spectral features (aperiodic and periodic component) mediate age-related changes across different brain regions, in multiple cognitive and metacognitive domains, which not only provides us with a better understanding of the ageing process but would also help in better prevention of cognitive impairments. A clear characterization of the association between baseline oscillatory component, 1/f activity, band ratio, healthy ageing and cognition, is established in this study.