Consistency in macroscopic human brain responses to noisy time-varying visual inputs

Abstract

It is an open question as to whether macroscopic human brain responses to repeatedly presented external inputs show consistent patterns across trials. We here provide experimental evidence that human brain responses to noisy time-varying visual inputs, as measured by scalp electroencephalography (EEG), show a signature of consistency. The results indicate that the EEG-recorded responses are robust against fluctuating ongoing activity, and that they respond to visual stimuli in a repeatable manner. This consistency presumably mediates robust information processing in the brain. Moreover, the EEG response waveforms were discriminable between individuals, and were invariant over a number of days within individuals. We reveal that time-varying noisy visual inputs can harness macroscopic brain dynamics and can manifest hidden individual variations.