scholarly journals Modulation of gamma spectral amplitude and connectivity during reaching predicts peak velocity and movement duration

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa Tatti ◽  
Francesca Ferraioli ◽  
Alberto Cacciola ◽  
Cameron Chan ◽  
Angelo Quartarone ◽  
...  

Voluntary movements are accompanied by increased oscillatory activity or synchronization in the gamma range (> 25.5 Hz) within the sensorimotor system. Despite the extensive literature about movement-related gamma synchronization, the specific role of gamma oscillations for movement control is still debated. In this study, we characterized movement-related gamma oscillatory dynamics and its relationship with movement characteristics based on 256-channels EEG recordings in 64 healthy subjects while performing fast and uncorrected reaching movements to targets located at three distances. We found that movement-related gamma synchronization occurred during both movement planning and execution, albeit with different gamma peak frequencies and topographies. Also, the amplitude of gamma synchronization in both planning and execution increased with target distance. Additional analysis of phase coherence revealed a gamma-coordinated long-range network involving occipital, frontal and central regions during movement execution. Gamma synchronization amplitude and phase coherence pattern reliably predicted peak velocity amplitude and timing, thus suggesting that cortical gamma oscillations play a significant role in the selection of appropriate kinematic parameters during planning and in their implementation during movement execution.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Ramirez-Gordillo ◽  
Andrew A. Parra ◽  
K. Ulrich Bayer ◽  
Diego Restrepo

Learning and memory requires coordinated activity between different regions of the brain. Here we studied the interaction between medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and hippocampal dorsal CA1 during associative odorant discrimination learning in the mouse. We found that as the animal learns to discriminate odorants in a go-no go task the coupling of high frequency neural oscillations to the phase of theta oscillations (phase-amplitude coupling or PAC) changes in a manner that results in divergence between rewarded and unrewarded odorant-elicited changes in the theta-phase referenced power (tPRP) for beta and gamma oscillations. In addition, in the proficient animal there was a decrease in the coordinated oscillatory activity between CA1 and mPFC in the presence of the unrewarded odorant. Furthermore, the changes in PAC resulted in a marked increase in the accuracy for decoding odorant identity from tPRP when the animal became proficient. Finally, we studied the role of Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II α (CaMKIIα), a protein involved in learning and memory, in oscillatory neural processing in this task. We find that the accuracy for decoding the odorant identity from tPRP decreases in CaMKIIα knockout mice and that this accuracy correlates with behavioral performance. These results implicate a role for PAC and CaMKIIα in olfactory go-no go associative learning in the hippocampal-prefrontal circuit.


2013 ◽  
Vol 110 (4) ◽  
pp. 952-963 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia F. Sayegh ◽  
Kara M. Hawkins ◽  
Kari L. Hoffman ◽  
Lauren E. Sergio

The aim of this research was to understand how the brain controls voluntary movement when not directly interacting with the object of interest. In the present study, we examined the role of premotor cortex in this behavior. The goal of this study was to characterize the oscillatory activity within the caudal and rostral subdivisions of dorsal premotor cortex (PMdc and PMdr) with a change from the most basic reaching movement to one that involves a simple dissociation between the actions of the eyes and hand. We were specifically interested in how PMdr and PMdc respond when the eyes and hand are decoupled by moving along different spatial planes. We recorded single-unit activity and local field potentials within PMdr and PMdc from two rhesus macaques during performance of two types of visually guided reaches. During the standard condition, a visually guided reach was performed whereby the visual stimulus guiding the movement was the target of the reach itself. During the nonstandard condition, the visual stimulus provided information about the direction of the required movement but was not the target of the motor output. We observed distinct task-related and topographical differences between PMdr and PMdc. Our results support functional differences between PMdr and PMdc during visually guided reaching. PMdr activity appears more involved in integrating the rule-based aspects of a visually guided reach, whereas PMdc is more involved in the online updating of the decoupled reach. More broadly, our results highlight the necessity of accounting for the nonstandard nature of a motor task when interpreting movement control research data.


1999 ◽  
Vol 82 (5) ◽  
pp. 2441-2450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Solange van der Linden ◽  
Ferruccio Panzica ◽  
Marco de Curtis

Fast oscillations at 25–80 Hz (gamma activity) have been proposed to play a role in attention-related mechanisms and synaptic plasticity in cortical structures. Recently, it has been demonstrated that the preservation of the entorhinal cortex is necessary to maintain gamma oscillations in the hippocampus. Because gamma activity can be reproduced in vitro by cholinergic activation, this study examined the characteristics of gamma oscillations induced by arterial perfusion or local intracortical injections of carbachol in the entorhinal cortex of the in vitro isolated guinea pig brain preparation. Shortly after carbachol administration, fast oscillatory activity at 25.2–28.2 Hz was observed in the medial but not in the lateral entorhinal cortex. Such activity was transiently associated with oscillations in the theta range that showed a variable pattern of distribution in the entorhinal cortex. No oscillatory activity was observed when carbachol was injected in the lateral entorhinal cortex. Gamma activity in the medial entorhinal cortex showed a phase reversal at 200–400 μm, had maximal amplitude at 400–500 μm depth, and was abolished by arterial perfusion of atropine (5 μM). Local carbachol application in the medial entorhinal cortex induced gamma oscillations in the hippocampus, whereas no oscillations were observed in the amygdala and in the piriform, periamygdaloid, and perirhinal cortices ipsilateral and contralateral to the carbachol injection. Hippocampal oscillations had higher frequency than the gamma activity recorded in the entorhinal cortex, suggesting the presence of independent generators in the two structures. The selective ability of the medial but not the lateral entorhinal cortex to generate gamma activity in response to cholinergic activation suggests a differential mode of signal processing in entorhinal cortex subregions.


2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (0) ◽  
pp. 119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Schubert ◽  
Brigitte Roeder ◽  
Tobias Heed

Crossing effects in temporal order judgment (TOJ) have been interpreted to indicate remapping of touch from somatotopic into external spatial coordinates. Such crossing effects have been reported to be absent in the congenitally blind, presumably indicating that they do not, by default, remap touch (e.g., Röder et al., 2004). Here, we devised a TOJ task in which participants, trial by trial, took on an uncrossed or crossed start posture and executed a cued movement with both arms into an uncrossed or crossed end posture. When stimulated during movement planning (i.e., before movement execution into the end posture), sighted participants’ performance was affected both by start posture (i.e., the posture during stimulation) as well as end posture (i.e., the currently planned posture). In contrast, blind participants showed a crossing effect for the start posture, but no effect of end posture. Thus, the blind do seem to remap touch when hand posture must be explicitly coded to perform the task such as when planning hand movements. However, whereas the sighted relate touch not only to current, but also to planned future postures, the blind seem to restrict remapping to current posture.


Author(s):  
Sebastian H. Bitzenhofer ◽  
Jastyn A. Pöpplau ◽  
Ileana L. Hanganu-Opatz

AbstractGamma oscillations are a prominent activity pattern in the cerebral cortex. While gamma rhythms have been extensively studied in the adult prefrontal cortex in the context of cognitive (dys)functions, little is known about their development. We addressed this issue by using extracellular recordings and optogenetic stimulations in mice across postnatal development. We show that fast rhythmic activity in the prefrontal cortex becomes prominent during the second postnatal week. While initially at about 15 Hz, fast oscillatory activity progressively accelerates with age and stabilizes within gamma frequency range (30-80 Hz) during the fourth postnatal week. Activation of layer 2/3 pyramidal neurons drives fast oscillations throughout development, yet the acceleration of their frequency follows similar temporal dynamics as the maturation of fast-spiking interneurons. These findings uncover the development of prefrontal gamma activity and provide a framework to examine the origin of abnormal gamma activity in neurodevelopmental disorders.


eLife ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giacomo Ariani ◽  
J Andrew Pruszynski ◽  
Jörn Diedrichsen

Motor planning plays a critical role in producing fast and accurate movement. Yet, the neural processes that occur in human primary motor and somatosensory cortex during planning, and how they relate to those during movement execution, remain poorly understood. Here we used 7T functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a delayed movement paradigm to study single finger movement planning and execution. The inclusion of no-go trials and variable delays allowed us to separate what are typically overlapping planning and execution brain responses. Although our univariate results show widespread deactivation during finger planning, multivariate pattern analysis revealed finger-specific activity patterns in contralateral primary somatosensory cortex (S1), which predicted the planned finger action. Surprisingly, these activity patterns were as informative as those found in contralateral primary motor cortex (M1). Control analyses ruled out the possibility that the detected information was an artifact of subthreshold movements during the preparatory delay. Furthermore, we observed that finger-specific activity patterns during planning were highly correlated to those during execution. These findings reveal that motor planning activates the specific S1 and M1 circuits that are engaged during the execution of a finger press, while activity in both regions is overall suppressed. We propose that preparatory states in S1 may improve movement control through changes in sensory processing or via direct influence of spinal motor neurons.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inge Leunissen ◽  
Manon Van Steenkiste ◽  
Kirstin Heise ◽  
Thiago Santos Monteiro ◽  
Kyle Dunovan ◽  
...  

Voluntary movements are accompanied by an increase in gamma-band oscillatory activity (60-100Hz) and a strong desynchronization of beta-band activity (13-30Hz) in the motor system at both the cortical and subcortical level. Conversely, successful motor inhibition is associated with increased beta power in a fronto-basal-ganglia network. Intriguingly, gamma activity also increases in response to a stop-signal. In this study, we used transcranial alternating current stimulation to drive beta and gamma oscillations to investigate whether these frequencies are causally related to motor inhibition. We found that 20Hz stimulation targeted at the pre-supplementary motor area enhanced inhibition and increased beta oscillatory activity around the time of the stop-signal in trials directly following stimulation. In contrast, 70Hz stimulation seemed to slow down the braking process, and predominantly affected go task performance. These results demonstrate that the effects of tACS are state-dependent and that especially fronto-central beta activity is a functional marker for successful motor inhibition.


2003 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clayton T. Dickson ◽  
Gerardo Biella ◽  
Marco de Curtis

Slow (<1 Hz) periodic activity is a distinctive discharge pattern observed in different cortical and sub-cortical structures during sleep and anesthesia. By performing field and cellular recordings, we demonstrated that slow periodic events (0.02–0.4 Hz) are spontaneously generated in the entorhinal cortex of the in vitro isolated whole brain of the guinea pig. These events were characterized by gradually developing runs of low-amplitude (50–300 μV), high-frequency (25–70 Hz) oscillations superimposed on a slow potential that lasted 1–3 s. Both slow and fast components showed a phase reversal in the superficial layers. In layer II-III entorhinal neurons, the slow periodic events correlated to a slowly developing depolarizing envelope capped by subthreshold membrane potential oscillations and action potential discharge. Slow periodic field events propagated tangentially across the entorhinal cortex and could be triggered by stimulation of superficial associative fibers, suggesting that they were generated by and propagated via network interactions in the superficial layers. Slow periodic events were reversibly abolished by muscarinic excitation elicited by carbachol (50 μM) that promoted intracellular membrane potential depolarization associated with continuous fast oscillatory activity in the gamma frequency range. These results suggest that, as proposed in vivo, activity changes in the entorhinal cortex of the in vitro isolated guinea-pig brain reflect different activation states that are under cholinergic control.


Neurosurgery ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (Supplement_1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Doris D Wang ◽  
Coralie de Hemptinne ◽  
Svjetlana Miocinovic ◽  
Witney Chen ◽  
Jill L Ostrem ◽  
...  

Abstract INTRODUCTION In Parkinson's disease, the emergence of motor dysfunction is thought to be related to an imbalance between antikinetic and prokinetic patterns of oscillatory activity in the motor network. Invasive recordings from the basal ganglia and cortex in surgical patients have suggested that levodopa and therapeutic deep brain stimulation can suppress antikinetic beta band (13-30 Hz) rhythms while promoting prokinetic gamma band (60-90 Hz) rhythms. Surgical ablation of the globus pallidus internus is one of the oldest effective therapies for Parkinson's disease and gives a remarkable immediate relief from rigidity and bradykinesia, but its effects on oscillatory activity in the motor network have not been studied. We characterize the effects of pallidotomy on cortical oscillatory activity in Parkinson's disease patients. METHODS Using a temporary 6-contact lead placed over the sensorimotor cortex in the subdural space, we recorded acute changes in cortical oscillatory activities in 3 Parkinson's disease patients undergoing pallidotomy and compared the results to that of 3 essential tremor patients undergoing thalamotomy. RESULTS In all 3 Parkinson's disease patients, we observed the emergence of an approximately 70 to 80 Hz narrow-band oscillation with effective thermolesion of the pallidum. This gamma oscillatory activity was spatially localized over the primary motor cortex, was minimally affected by voluntary movements, and was not found in the motor cortex of essential tremor patients undergoing thalamotomy. CONCLUSION Our finding suggests that acute lesioning of the pallidum promotes cortical gamma band oscillations. This may represent an important mechanism for alleviating bradykinesia in Parkinson's disease.


2009 ◽  
Vol 101 (2) ◽  
pp. 789-802 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Weinberger ◽  
W. D. Hutchison ◽  
A. M. Lozano ◽  
M. Hodaie ◽  
J. O. Dostrovsky

Rest tremor is one of the main symptoms in Parkinson's disease (PD), although in contrast to rigidity and akinesia, the severity of the tremor does not correlate well with the degree of dopamine deficiency or the progression of the disease. Studies suggest that akinesia in PD patients is related to abnormal increased beta (15–30 Hz) and decreased gamma (35–80 Hz) synchronous oscillatory activity in the basal ganglia. Here we investigated the dynamics of oscillatory activity in the subthalamic nucleus (STN) during tremor. We used two adjacent microelectrodes to simultaneously record neuronal firing and local field potential (LFP) activity in nine PD patients who exhibited resting tremor during functional neurosurgery. We found that neurons exhibiting oscillatory activity at tremor frequency are located in the dorsal region of STN, where neurons with beta oscillatory activity are observed, and that their activity is coherent with LFP oscillations in the beta frequency range. Interestingly, in 85% of the 58 sites examined, the LFP exhibited increased oscillatory activity in the low gamma frequency range (35–55 Hz) during periods with stronger tremor. Furthermore, in 17 of 26 cases where two LFPs were recorded simultaneously, their coherence in the gamma range increased with increased tremor. When averaged across subjects, the ratio of the beta to gamma coherence was significantly lower in periods with stronger tremor compared with periods of no or weak tremor. These results suggest that resting tremor in PD is associated with an altered balance between beta and gamma oscillations in the motor circuits of STN.


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