ENTROPY MEASURES OF ERP RECORDINGS FOR DUAL TASKS IN MAN

The present study is to investigate the application of sample entropy (SampEn) measures to electrophysiological studies of single and dual tasking performance.The complexity and regularity of short-duration (～s) epochs of electroencephalographic data were analysed using SampEn along with the method of surrogate data.Signals were collected under single and dual tasking conditions.Individual tasks consisted of an auditory discrimination task and two motor tasks of varying difficulty.Dual task conditions were combinations of one auditory and one of motor tasks.EEG entropies were significantly lower in dual tasks compared to that in the single tasks (P0.05～0.001,for comparison between auditory single task and auditory/motor dual task).The results suggest that the neural information transmission or communication in the subjects who performed auditory dual tasks in either with motor1 or motor2 could be more isolated or impaired compared to that in the subjects who only performed auditory single task.The data demonstrated that entropy measurements could be a useful alternative and nonlinear approach to analysing short duration EEG signals on a time scale of seconds.