Effect of animal behavior on EEG microstates in healthy children: An outdoor observation task

Analyzing physiological signals in the brain under outdoor conditions, like observing animal behavior, forms the normative basis for the outdoor task and provides new insights into the cognitive neuronal mechanisms of children’s functional brain systems. Here we investigated EEG data from a cohort of seventeen children (6–7 years old, 30-channel EEG) in the resting state and animal-observation state, using the microstate method combined with source-localization analysis to identify the changes in network-level functional interactions. Our study suggested that: while observing animal behavior, the parameters (global explained variance, occurrence, coverage, and duration) of microstates showed a regular trend, and the dynamic reorganization patterns of children’s brains were associated with verbal input networks and higher-order cognitive networks; the activity of the brain network in the frontal and temporal lobes of children increased, while the activity of the insula brain area decreased after observing the behavioral activities of animals. This study may be essential to understand the effects of animal behavior on changes in healthy children’s emotions and have important implications for education.