Periodic/Aperiodic parameterization of transient oscillations (PAPTO)–Implications for healthy ageing

Two techniques for analyzing human extracranial neurophysiological signals, namely the periodic/aperiodic parameterization of neural power spectra and the transient events framework of oscillatory activity, have recently emerged in the scientific literature. In this work, we integrate these two analysis perspectives to analyze extracranial neurophysiological signals as a series of transient rhythmic events disambiguated from the background aperiodic activity. We call this novel technique the periodic/aperiodic parametrization of transient oscillations (PAPTO). We demonstrate PAPTO by investigating resting-state sensorimotor magnetoencephalography recordings from the Cambridge Center for Ageing and Neuroscience cross-sectional study on healthy ageing (n = 600, ages 18–88). We show that PAPTO is more sensitive to neocortical transient beta rhythms compared to more conventional transient event detection algorithms and captures more variance in the resting-state occurrence rate of beta events across participants. The improved sensitivity of PAPTO reveals that the beta occurrence rate almost doubles over the adult lifespan which we discuss in terms of thalamocortical beta generation in the somatosensory cortex and the age-related decline of sensory perception.