Application of small-world measures to multichannel event-related potential activity during generation of global and local imagery

The Small world model has been successfully used to explore the abnormal pattern of brain information processing in some neuropsychiatric diseases, but not engaged in the study of cognitive functions. We apply the small-world measures: the clustering coefficient and average path length, to evaluate multi-channel event-related potential activity during the generation of global and local imagery. Results show that the brain functional networks of the global and local imagery generation are both small-world ones. In addition, the local imagery generation has a larger clustering coefficient, while the global imagery generation has a shorter average path length. These results support the global precedence in the global-local imagery generation, and reflect the different processing modes in which global imagery emphasizes particularly on global integration, while local imagery on local specialization. Our results indicate that small-world measures could be applied to quantify the difference of brain activities in different cognitive tasks, and further provide some explanations for cognitive behavior.