Gating Patterns to Proprioceptive Stimulation in Various Cortical Areas: An MEG Study in Children and Adults using Spatial ICA.

Jaakko Vallinoja,Timo Nurmi,Harri Piitulainen,Julia Jaatela

doi:10.1093/cercor/bhaa306

Jaakko Vallinoja, Timo Nurmi + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhaa306

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Abstract

Proprioceptive paired-stimulus paradigm was used for 30 children (10–17 years) and 21 adult (25–45 years) volunteers in magnetoencephalography (MEG). Their right index finger was moved twice with 500-ms interval every 4 ± 25 s (repeated 100 times) using a pneumatic-movement actuator. Spatial-independent component analysis (ICA) was applied to identify stimulus-related components from MEG cortical responses. Clustering was used to identify spatiotemporally consistent components across subjects. We found a consistent primary response in the primary somatosensory (SI) cortex with similar gating ratios of 0.72 and 0.69 for the children and adults, respectively. Secondary responses with similar transient gating behavior were centered bilaterally in proximity of the lateral sulcus. Delayed and prolonged responses with strong gating were found in the frontal and parietal cortices possibly corresponding to larger processing network of somatosensory afference. No significant correlation between age and gating ratio was found. We confirmed that cortical gating to proprioceptive stimuli is comparable to other somatosensory and auditory domains, and between children and adults. Gating occurred broadly beyond SI cortex. Spatial ICA revealed several consistent response patterns in various cortical regions which would have been challenging to detect with more commonly applied equivalent current dipole or distributed source estimates.

Highlights

Sensory gating of repeated stimuli is a robust well-demonstrated phenomenon, where successive sensory stimuli presented with short intervals result in the reduction of the respective response amplitudes at the sensory cortices (Fruhstorfer et al 1970; McLaughlin and Kelly 1993)
The primary cortical evoked fields are attenuated at interstimulus interval (ISI) below 8–16 s for auditory (Hari et al 1982; Lü et al 1992; Forss et al 1993), below 1 s for visual (Uusitalo et al 1997) and below 8 s for proprioceptive (Smeds et al 2017) stimuli
We aimed to examine the cortical proprioceptive gating to paired evoked-movement stimuli using an independent component analysis (ICA) approach to determine several stimulus-relevant source locations and time-courses from MEG signals

Summary

Introduction

Sensory gating of repeated stimuli is a robust well-demonstrated phenomenon, where successive sensory stimuli presented with short intervals result in the reduction of the respective response amplitudes at the sensory cortices (Fruhstorfer et al 1970; McLaughlin and Kelly 1993). Maximum responses are achieved only at interstimulus interval (ISI) of several seconds or even tens of seconds, depending on the response latency, cortical area, and sensory modality. The primary cortical evoked fields are attenuated at ISIs below 8–16 s for auditory (Hari et al 1982; Lü et al 1992; Forss et al 1993), below 1 s for visual (Uusitalo et al 1997) and below 8 s for proprioceptive (Smeds et al 2017) stimuli. One possibility is that the gating in the primary sensory cortices is caused by an inhibitory effect It appears that the prefrontal cortices may regulate the sensory gating (Mayer et al 2009)

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