Transient spectral events in resting state MEG predict individual time-frequency task responses

Abstract

Even in response to apparently simple tasks such as hand moving, human brain activity shows remarkable inter-subject variability. Presumably, this variability reflects genuine behavioural or functional variability. Recently, spatial variability of resting-state features in fMRI - specifically connectivity - has been shown to explain (spatial) task-response variability. Such a link, however, is still missing for M/EEG data and its spectrally rich structure. At the same time, it has recently been shown that task responses in M/EEG can be well represented using transient spectral events bursting at fast time scales. Here, we show that individual differences in the spatio-spectral structure of M/EEG task responses, can, to a reasonable degree, be predicted from individual differences in transient spectral events identified at rest. In a MEG dataset of diverse task conditions (including motor responses, working memory and language comprehension tasks) and resting-state sessions for each subject (n = 89), we used Hidden-Markov-Modelling to identify transient spectral events as a feature set to learn the mapping of space-time-frequency content from rest to task. Resulting trial-averaged, subject-specific task-response predictions were then compared with the actual task responses in left-out subjects. All task conditions were predicted significantly above chance. Furthermore, we observed a systematic relationship between genetic similarity (e.g. unrelated subjects vs. twins) and predictability. These findings support the idea that subject-specific transient spectral events in resting-state neural activity are linked to, and predictive of, subject-specific trial-averaged task responses in a wide range of experimental conditions.