The psychological and physiological meanings of resting-state global brain signal (GS) and GS topography have been well confirmed. However, the causal relationship between GS and local signals was largely unknown. Based on the Human Connectome Project dataset, we investigated the effective GS topography using the Granger causality (GC) method. In consistent with GS topography, both effective GS topographies from GS to local signals and from local signals to GS showed greater GC values in sensory and motor regions in most frequency bands, suggesting that the unimodal superiority is an intrinsic architecture of GS topography. However, the significant frequency effect for GC values from GS to local signals was primarily located in unimodal regions and dominated at slow 4 frequency band whereas that from local signals to GS was mainly located in transmodal regions and dominated at slow 6 frequency band, consisting with the opinion that the more integrated the function, the lower the frequency. These findings provided valuable insight for the frequency-dependent effective GS topography, improving the understanding of the underlying mechanism of GS topography.
Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11571-022-09831-0.
Keywords: Effective connection; Frequency-specific; Global signal; Granger causality; fMRI.
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2022.