A History of Concussion Affects Relevancy-Based Modulation of Cortical Responses to Tactile Stimuli

Abstract

Modulating cortical excitability based on a stimulus' relevance to the task at hand is a component of sensory gating, and serves to protect higher cortical centers from being overwhelmed with irrelevant information (McIlroy et al., 2003; Kumar et al., 2005; Wasaka et al., 2005). This study examined relevancy-based modulation of cortical excitability, and corresponding behavioral responses, in the face of distracting stimuli in participants with and without a history of concussion (mean age 22 ± 3 SD years; most recent concussion 39.1 ± 30 SD months). Participants were required to make a scaled motor response to the amplitudes of visual and tactile stimuli presented individually or concurrently. Task relevance was manipulated, and stimuli were occasionally presented with irrelevant distractors. Electroencephalography (EEG) and task accuracy data were collected from participants with and without a history of concussion. The somatosensory-evoked N70 event-related potential (ERP) was significantly modulated by task relevance in the control group but not in those with a history of concussion, and there was a significantly greater cost to task accuracy in the concussion history group when relevant stimuli were presented with an irrelevant distractor. This study demonstrated that relevancybased modulation of electrophysiological responses and behavioral correlates of sensory gating differ in people with and without a history of concussion, even after patients were symptom-free and considered recovered from their injuries.

Somatosensory Event-Related Potential as an Electrophysiological Correlate of Endogenous Spatial Tactile Attention: Prospects for Electrotactile Brain-Computer Interface for Sensory Training

“…In previous studies, somatosensory ERP responses elicited within the tactile attention task to electrical stimuli of exclusively sensory nerve branches of the fingers showed early (exogenous) components (N20, P40/50, N70) [14,27,28] which were unaffected by the cognitive (attention) task, and later components starting from 100 ms after the stimulus which were affected by the attention task (P100, N140, P300) [24,26,29]. In our study we applied somatosensory stimulation over the mixed nerve branches of median and radial nerves of the forearm by stimulating the innervated muscles (unlike stimulation of exclusively sensory nerve branches used in previous sERP research).…”

Sabotage Detection Using DL Models on EEG Data From a Cognitive-Motor Integration Task

“…However, there is evidence that subjective symptoms may resolve before full neurological recovery has occurred, leading to vulnerability to further injury (Hurtubise et al, 2016;Sergio et al, 2020). Deficits have been reported in a wide range of laboratory and neurophysiological outcome measures in asymptomatic individuals after concussion (Thériault et al, 2009;Slobounov et al, 2012;Baker and Cinelli, 2014;Tapper et al, 2016;Adams et al, 2020;Manning et al, 2020). This reliance of self-reported symptoms, therefore, means that diagnosis is less precise, intervention targets are more difficult to identify, and determining recovery is less clear than would be possible with more objective measures.…”