Mutual Information between EDA and EEG in Multiple Cognitive Tasks and Sleep Deprivation Conditions

Sleep deprivation, a widespread phenomenon that affects one-third of normal American adults, induces adverse changes in physical and cognitive performance, which in turn increases the occurrence of accidents. Sleep deprivation is known to increase resting blood pressure and decrease muscle sympathetic nerve activity. Monitoring changes in the interplay between the central and autonomic sympathetic nervous system can be a potential indicator of human’s readiness to perform tasks that involve a certain level of cognitive load (e.g., driving). The electroencephalogram (EEG) is the standard to assess the brain’s activity. The electrodermal activity (EDA) is a reflection of the general state of arousal regulated by the activation of the sympathetic nervous system through sweat gland stimulation. In this work, we calculated the mutual information between EDA and EEG recordings in order to consider linear and non-linear interactions and provide an insight of the relationship between brain activity and peripheral autonomic sympathetic activity. We analyzed EEG and EDA data from ten participants performing four cognitive tasks every two hours during 24 h (12 trials). We decomposed EEG data into delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma spectral components, and EDA into tonic and phasic components. The results demonstrate high values of mutual information between the EDA and delta component of EEG, mainly in working memory tasks. Additionally, we found an increase in the theta component of EEG in the presence of fatigue caused by sleep deprivation, the alpha component in tasks demanding inhibition and attention, and the delta component in working memory tasks. In terms of the location of brain activity, most of the tasks report high mutual information in frontal regions in the initial trials, with a trend to decrease and become uniform for all the nine analyzed EEG channels as a consequence of the sleep deprivation effect. Our results evidence the interplay between central and sympathetic nervous activity and can be used to mitigate the consequences of sleep deprivation.