Estimating Learning Effects: A Short-Time Fourier Transform Regression Model for MEG Source Localization

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) has a high temporal resolution well-suited for studying perceptual learning. However, to identify where learning happens in the brain, one needs to apply source localization techniques to project MEG sensor data into brain space. Previous source localization methods, such as the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) method by Gramfort et al.([6]) produced intriguing results, but they were not designed to incorporate trial-by-trial learning effects. Here we modify the approach in [6] to produce an STFT-based source localization method (STFT-R) that includes an additional regression of the STFT components on covariates such as the behavioral learning curve. We also exploit a hierarchical L21 penalty to induce structured sparsity of STFT components and to emphasize signals from regions of interest (ROIs) that are selected according to prior knowledge. In reconstructing the ROI source signals from simulated data, STFT-R achieved smaller errors than a two-step method using the popular minimum-norm estimate (MNE), and in a real-world human learning experiment, STFT-R yielded more interpretable results about what time-frequency components of the ROI signals were correlated with learning.