Between-Frequency Topographical and Dynamic High-Order Functional Connectivity for Driving Drowsiness Assessment

Previous studies exploring driving drowsiness utilized spectral power and functional connectivity without considering between-frequency and more complex synchronizations. To complement such lacks, we explored inter-regional synchronizations based on the topographical and dynamic properties between frequency bands using high-order functional connectivity (HOFC) and envelope correlation. We proposed the dynamic interactions of HOFC, associated-HOFC, and a global metric measuring the aggregated effect of the functional connectivity. The EEG dataset was collected from 30 healthy subjects, undergoing two driving sessions. The two-session setting was employed for evaluating the metric reliability across sessions. Based on the results, we observed reliably significant metric changes, mainly involving the alpha band. In HOFCθ α HOFC α β associated-HOFC θ α , and associated-HOFC α β the connection-level metrics in frontal-central, central-central, and central-parietal/occipital areas were significantly increased, indicating a dominance in the central region. Similar results were also obtained in the HOFC θ α β and aHOFC θ α β. For dynamic-low-order-FC and dynamic-HOFC, the global metrics revealed a reliably significant increment in the alpha, theta-alpha, and alpha-beta bands. Modularity indexes of associated-HOFCα and associated-HOFC θ α also exhibited reliably significant differences. This paper demonstrated that within-band and between-frequency topographical and dynamic FC can provide complementary information to the traditional individual-band LOFC for assessing driving drowsiness.