Functional significance of the global signal across the lifespan

COEX 

Spatiotemporal patterns resembling global signal (GS) topography were shown to explain > 20% of the variance in intrinsic BOLD timeseries (Bolt et al., 2022). Such GS topography was also mediated by individual differences in positive/ negative life outcomes and psychological function (Li et al., 2019). More recently, we found systematic age-associations, where subcortical vs. cortical contributions to the GS topography differed across the lifespan (Nomi et al., 2023). These results suggest that the GS contains rich information related to trait-level cognition, highlighting the need to carefully consider whether or not to remove the GS during preprocessing.