Effect of excessive Internet use on the time–frequency characteristic of EEG (2009)

Hongqiang Yu, Xin Zhao, Ning Li, Mingshi Wang, Peng Zhou

Source

Progress in Natural Science: Materials International > 2009 > 19 > 10 > 1383-1387

Abstract

We examined the effect of excessive Internet use on the time–frequency characteristic of the electroencephalogram by wavelet transformed and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). The event-related potentials (ERP) of normal subjects and excessive Internet users were acquired using the oddball paradigm experiment. We applied the wavelet transformed and event-related spectral perturbation to ERP in order to extract the time–frequency values. The F-test statistics of time–frequency values were then decomposed into two components by NMF. Excessive Internet use resulted in a significant decrease in the P300 amplitudes (P<0.05) and a significant increase in the P300 latency (P<0.05) in all electrodes. The major effect of excessive Internet use on gamma oscillation occurred at ∼300ms after stimuli at 40–50Hz on the parietal central region. Thus, these data suggest that excessive Internet use affects information coding and integration in the brain.