Wide Range Multiscale Entropy Changes through Development

How variability in the brain’s neurophysiologic signals evolves during development is important for a global, system-level understanding of brain maturation and its disturbance in neurodevelopmental disorders. In the current study, we use multiscale entropy (MSE), a measure that has been related to signal complexity, to investigate how this variability evolves during development across a broad range of temporal scales. We computed MSE, standard deviation (STD) and standard spectral analyses on resting EEG from 188 healthy individuals aged 8–22 years old. We found age-related increases in entropy at lower scales (<~20 ms) and decreases in entropy at higher scales (~60–80 ms). Decreases in the overall signal STD were anticorrelated with entropy, especially in the lower scales, where regression analyses showed substantial covariation of observed changes. Our findings document for the first time the scale dependency of developmental changes from childhood to early adulthood, challenging a parsimonious MSE-based account of brain maturation along a unidimensional, complexity measure. At the level of analysis permitted by electroencephalography (EEG), MSE could capture critical spatiotemporal variations in the role of noise in the brain. However, interpretations critically rely on defining how signal STD affects MSE properties.