On the Topological Changes of Brain Functional Networks under Priming and Ambiguity

The relationship between different brain areas is characterized by functional networks through correlations of time series obtained from neuroimaging experiments. Due to its high spatial resolution, functional MRI data is commonly used for generating functional networks of the entire brain. These networks are comprised of the measurement points/channels as nodes and links are established if there is a correlation in the measured time series of these nodes. However, since the evaluation of correlation becomes more accurate with the length of the underlying time series, we construct in this paper functional networks from MEG data, which has a much higher time resolution than fMRI. We study in particular how the network topologies change in an experiment on ambiguity of words, where the subject first receives a priming word before being presented with an ambiguous or unambiguous target word. key words: brain functional networks, MEG, complex networks, network topology