Abstract
Coherence between electroencephalography (EEG) recorded on the scalp above the motor cortex and electromyography (EMG) recorded on the skin of the limbs is thought to reflect corticospinal coupling between motor cortex and muscle motor units. Beta-range (13–30 Hz) corticomuscular coherence has been extensively documented during static force output while gamma-range (31–45 Hz) coherence has been linked to dynamic force output. However, the explanation for this beta-to-gamma coherence shift remains unclear. We recorded 264-channel EEG and 8-channel lower limb EMG while eight healthy subjects performed isometric and isotonic, knee, and ankle exercises. Adaptive mixture independent component analysis (AMICA) parsed EEG into models of underlying source signals. We computed magnitude squared coherence between electrocortical source signals and EMG. Significant coherence between contralateral motor cortex electrocortical signals and lower limb EMG was observed in the beta- and gamma-range for all exercise types. Gamma-range coherence was significantly greater for isotonic exercises than for isometric exercises. We conclude that active muscle movement modulates the speed of corticospinal oscillations. Specifically, isotonic contractions shift corticospinal oscillations toward the gamma-range while isometric contractions favor beta-range oscillations. Prior research has suggested that tasks requiring increased integration of visual and somatosensory information may shift corticomuscular coherence to the gamma-range. The isometric and isotonic tasks studied here likely required similar amounts of visual and somatosensory integration. This suggests that muscle dynamics, including the amount and type of proprioception, may play a role in the beta-to-gamma shift.
Highlights
Coherence between electroencephalography (EEG) recorded on the scalp above the motor cortex and electromyography (EMG) recorded on the skin over muscles is thought to reflect corticospinal coupling between motor cortex and pooled motor units (Mima and Hallett, 1999; Negro and Farina, 2011)
We hypothesized that isotonic contractions would elicit gamma-range corticomuscular coherence while the isometric contractions would elicit beta-range coherence
What we found was that both tasks elicited beta and gamma range coherence
Summary
Coherence between electroencephalography (EEG) recorded on the scalp above the motor cortex and electromyography (EMG) recorded on the skin over muscles is thought to reflect corticospinal coupling between motor cortex and pooled motor units (Mima and Hallett, 1999; Negro and Farina, 2011). Corticomuscular coherence phase lags are consistent with the conduction time between the motor cortex and the respective muscle This suggests that the motor cortex drives the motorneuron pool (Gross et al, 2000). There have been a few studies investigating EEG-EMG coherence for lower limbs muscles (Mima et al, 2000; Hansen et al, 2002; Raethjen et al, 2008; Vecchio et al, 2008) For both the upper and lower limbs, the existence of these causal descending signals reflects motor cortex control of voluntary movements via pyramidal pathways (Mima and Hallett, 1999; Gross et al, 2000; Negro and Farina, 2011)
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