Functional coupling of sensorimotor and associative areas during a catching ball task: a qEEG coherence study

Abstract

BackgroundCatching an object is a complex movement that involves not only programming but also effective motor coordination. Such behavior is related to the activation and recruitment of cortical regions that participates in the sensorimotor integration process. This study aimed to elucidate the cortical mechanisms involved in anticipatory actions when performing a task of catching an object in free fall.MethodsQuantitative electroencephalography (qEEG) was recorded using a 20-channel EEG system in 20 healthy right-handed participants performed the catching ball task. We used the EEG coherence analysis to investigate subdivisions of alpha (8-12 Hz) and beta (12-30 Hz) bands, which are related to cognitive processing and sensory-motor integration.ResultsNotwithstanding, we found the main effects for the factor block; for alpha-1, coherence decreased from the first to sixth block, and the opposite effect occurred for alpha-2 and beta-2, with coherence increasing along the blocks.ConclusionIt was concluded that to perform successfully our task, which involved anticipatory processes (i.e. feedback mechanisms), subjects exhibited a great involvement of sensory-motor and associative areas, possibly due to organization of information to process visuospatial parameters and further catch the falling object.

Performance of Down syndrome subjects during a coincident timing task

“…Our study presents important findings, since motor development has been recently investigated [41-44]. The task performed in this experiment has been criticized due to the fact that it is very simple for individuals that do not have the Down syndrome, which prevents the results achieved from being generalized for the performance of activities in the real world [26].…”

Electrophysiological Correlates of the Threshold to Detection of Passive Motion: An Investigation in Professional Volleyball Athletes with and without Atrophy of the Infraspinatus Muscle

“…Continuous EEG data were epoched in 9000-millisecond windows time-locked to the trigger. The baseline was set between −2000 ms and 0, similarly to previous works from our group [34–36], the analysis period of interest between 0 and 7000 ms, in order to more information about the movement perception and detection. The data were submitted to Independent Component Analysis (ICA), which was implemented in EEGLAB [8] under the Matlab platform, in order to remove the components that eminently contained artifacts.…”

Comparison of Smoothing Filters in Analysis of EEG Data for the Medical Diagnostics Purposes

“…As it was mentioned above, the 'C3' and 'C4' locations are located over the contra-lateral cortical regions and these are responsible for the limbs' movements, especially for the hand movements [33]. These are also linked with motor preparation and execution, while the 'P3' and 'P4' represent the medial parietal areas linked with the sensory information [30].…”

“…The authors of this paper decided to focus on four channels only: 'C3', 'C4', 'P3' and 'P4', because the 'C3' and 'C4' electrodes are placed above the primary motor cortex area for the hand and foot movements, which was assumed to be the appropriate location for analysis of hand movements [29,30]. The location of the 'C3' and 'C4' electrodes is also linked with the motor preparation and movement execution, where the 'P3' and 'P4' electrodes represent the parietal area and are functionally related to integration of sensory information from different modalities [30,31]. These are also so-called homologous electrode pairs (left-right centrals and left-right parietals) [32].…”