EEG Theta/Beta Ratio Neurofeedback Training in Healthy Females
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EEG Theta/Beta Ratio Neurofeedback Training in Healthy Females Dana van Son1,2 · Willem van der Does1,2 · Guido P. H. Band1,2 · Peter Putman1,2
© The Author(s) 2020
Abstract A growing number of studies suggest that EEG theta/beta ratio (TBR) is inversely related to executive cognitive control. Neurofeedback training aimed at reducing TBR (TBR NFT) might provide a tool to study causality in this relation and might enhance human performance. To investigate whether TBR NFT reduces TBR in healthy participants. Twelve healthy female participants were assigned (single blind) to one of three groups. Groups differed on baseline durations and one group received only sham NFT. TBR NFT consisted of eight or fourteen 25-min sessions. No evidence was found that TBR NFT had any effect on TBR. The current TBR NFT protocol is possibly ineffective. This is in line with a previous study with a different protocol. Keywords EEG theta/beta ratio · Neurofeedback · Multiple baseline design
Introduction Resting state encephalographic (EEG) signals are composed of different frequency components, many of which are found to be relatively stable over time (Williams et al. 2005). Specific spectrum components reflect functional neural activity as an electrophysiological correlate with certain behaviors (Hofman and Schutter 2011; Sutton and Davidson 2000). For example, the ratio between activity in the theta band (4–7 Hz) and activity in the beta band (13–30 Hz), the theta/ beta ratio (TBR), has been related to different aspects of cognitive control and motivated decision making (Massar et al. 2014; Massar et al. 2012; Schutter and van Honk 2005), to attentional control in healthy young adults (Angelidis et al. 2016; Putman et al. 2010, 2014; van Son et al. 2018), to offtask thoughts (i.e. mind-wandering; van Son et al. 2019a, b) and to reversal learning (Wischnewski et al. 2016). Additionally, a higher baseline TBR was found to correlate to a stronger decline in cognitive control after stress-induction (Putman et al. 2014). TBR has a high test–retest reliability and predicts attentional control scores over a one-week * Dana van Son [email protected] 1
Institute of Psychology, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden, The Netherlands
2
interval (Angelidis et al. 2016). All in all, TBR is likely a stable electrophysiological marker of executive control. Attentional control is the ability to strategically deploy top-down controlled attention over bottom-up information processing (for instance intrusive anxious cognitions; see Verwoerd et al. 2008) to support performance of goaldirected tasks (Derryberry and Reed 2002). Lower levels of attentional control have, amongst others, been associated with general anxiety disorder (GAD; Amir et al. 2009). In GAD, anxiogenic cognitions take the form of perseverative worry, which consists of repetitive thoughts about everyday concerns (Armstrong et al. 2011; Burns et al. 1996) and are thought to start as uninhibited selective bottom-up thou
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