Establishing maturation trajectories of resting-state neural activity from infancy to preschool ages would improve opportunities for clinical assessment and intervention. This study evaluated the superiority of an adapted Dark-Room eyes-open condition over a standard eyes-open Video-On condition during magnetoencephalography as well as regional brain differences in resting-state activity in 107 young children. Associations between the resting-state measures and behavior were also examined. Typically developing children, 2-to-68 months-old, viewed a video without audio alternated with eyes open in total darkness. Source-localized resting-state power spectra from seven brain regions (parietal-occipital and left and right frontal, temporal, and central cortex) yielded periodic measures (dominant frequency and power) and aperiodic measures (exponent and offset of 1/f neuronal activity). As hypothesized, a dominant frequency response was observed more often in the Dark-Room than in the Video-On condition, the former eliciting 36% more dominant oscillation activity. Maturation of this dominant frequency increased non-linearly with age. Also as hypothesized, maturation of aperiodic measures decelerated with age, and maturation rate differed by brain region. Finally, more mature aperiodic values predicted better adaptive behaviors and daily living skills. (1)The use of an appropriate Dark-Room eyes-open task provides measures of young child resting-state periodic activity with excellent signal-to-noise ratio, better than the conventional video task. (2)Analyses in brain source space reveal regional differences in aperiodic activity and its maturation that typical scalp-space analyses have not addressed. (3)More mature aperiodic brain function measures predict higher developmental behavior scores, pointing to potential brain mechanisms supporting behavioral development.
Green et al. (Sun,) studied this question.