Cortical synchrony change under mental stress due to time pressure

People nowadays are usually involved in computer work within a required time, in which the subjects are under time pressure (TP). It has been reported that TP can impact the autonomic neural regulation system and cognitive behavior during and after the commitment. However, there are few studies on the influence of TP on the cortical information processing. In this study, we designed an experiment with three sessions of computer-based tasks under different background to investigate how TP affect the cortical information processing pattern by large-scale cortical synchrony analysis of the multichannel electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Results showed that compared with task without TP, task under TP could only cause the decrease of inter-hemispheric cortical synchrony. Synchronization analysis of multichannel EEG provides a new insight into the effect of TP on the functional cortical connection of brain.