Partial response electromyography as a marker of action stopping

Abstract

Response inhibition is among the core constructs of cognitive control. It is notoriously difficult to quantify from overt behavior, since the outcome of successful inhibition is the lack of a behavioral response. Therefore, model-based approaches have been developed to estimate the inhibition latency, such as the stop signal reaction time (SSRT) using the stop signal task. However, the model assumptions underlying the SSRT can be difficult to meet in practice. Recently, partial response electromyography (prEMG) has been introduced as a physiological measure to capture individual stopping latencies. PrEMG refers to muscle activity initiated by the go signal that plummets after the stop signal, before its accumulation to a full response. We provide a comprehensive overview of prEMG in a stop signal task, together with practical tips for data collection and analysis. Our analysis indicates that prEMG is a unique and reliable measure of stopping and we encourage its widespread use to investigate response inhibition.

Partial response electromyography as a marker of action stopping

“…The regression lines for the stop signal reaction time (SSRT)-prEMGlat plot are calculated excluding the outlier at top left. Note that the entry marked Raud et al, 2021 represent the data from current study.…”

“…Posterior distributions were updated well, suggesting that priors were largely uninformative. Plots showing the prior relative to posterior distributions, chains, and posterior predictive model checks can be found in the accompanying materials on OSF ( Raud et al, 2021 ).…”

“…EMG preprocessing and variable extractions were performed with custom scripts in MATLAB (The Math Works, Inc MATLAB , version 2018a) and eeglab ( Delorme and Makeig, 2004 ; version 14.1.1b) and are publicly available on the OSF ( Raud et al, 2021 ; https://osf.io/rqnuj/ ). The EMG signal was bandpass filtered between 20 and 250 Hz using a second-order butterworth filter and resampled to 500 Hz.…”

“…The associations between the behavioral and EMG measures were tested with general mixed models with ‘study’ as a random variable, using the R package lme4 ( Bates, 2022 ). The spreadsheet with extracted data for all included studies is uploaded in the accompanying OSF page ( Raud et al, 2021 ).…”

A robot-based interception task to quantify upper limb impairments in proprioceptive and visual feedback after stroke

“…A broad range of studies highlight how proprioceptive and visual feedback can be used to generate goal-directed motor corrections and initiate new motor actions within 100ms [ 2 , 3 ]. Impressively, even responses requiring cognitive functions such as aborting an on-going motor action can be generated within 200ms [ 4 ]. This use of proprioceptive and visual feedback for goal-directed motor actions is supported by highly distributed circuits including both cortical and subcortical structures [ 1 , 5 ].…”