Prefrontal EEG oscillatory profiles during wordle: A study of brainwave dynamics during digital word puzzle solving in students

Background: Word puzzle games that engage orthographic, lexical, and executive processing have become widely used in educational and everyday contexts, yet their neural correlates remain unexplored. Wordle a five-letter word guessing game requiring deductive reasoning, semantic retrieval, and constraint satisfaction is a naturalistic cognitive task of considerable neuropsychological interest. The prefrontal cortex (PFC), which orchestrates working memory, lexical search, and executive control, generates oscillatory activity across the gamma, beta, alpha, theta, and delta bands that is measurable via an EEG headband. Methods: Twelve students completed a single Wordle puzzle within a 10-minute allotted time. EEG was recorded using the Brain Link headband, yielding relative percentage power in eight sub-bands: mid-gamma, low-gamma, high-beta, low-beta, high-alpha, low-alpha, theta, and delta. Data from 12 participants with complete records were analysed. Results: Delta power was the dominant oscillatory component (mean: 36.86 ± 3.92%, significantly elevated above a uniform 20% baseline; t(11) = 4.30, p = 0.001). Beta was the second-largest band (17.06 ± 1.84%), followed by theta (21.85 ± 0.99%), alpha (14.39 ± 0.96%), and gamma (9.88 ± 1.09%). Strong inter-band correlations emerged, most notably a highly significant inverse relationship between beta and delta power (r = −0.932, p < 0.001), suggesting that students who engaged more effortful executive processing (beta) had proportionally less slow-wave inhibitory activity (delta), and vice versa. Substantial inter-individual variability was observed, potentially reflecting individual differences in cognitive strategy and Wordle proficiency. Conclusion: These findings suggest that Wordle-solving recruits a distinctive prefrontal oscillatory pattern dominated by delta and theta slow-wave activity, with a strong and theoretically coherent dissociation between fast-band executive engagement (beta) and slow-band inhibitory coordination (delta). This study extends the nascent literature on digital game-based cognitive neuroscience and provides a neurophysiological basis for future educational applications of Wordle-like tasks.