Abstract
Understanding rhythmic behavior in the context of coupled auditory and motor systems has been of interest to neurological rehabilitation, in particular, to facilitate walking. Recent work based on behavioral measures revealed an entrainment effect of auditory rhythms on motor rhythms. In this study, we propose a method to compute the neural component of such a process from an electroencephalographic (EEG) signal. A simple auditory-motor synchronization paradigm was used, where 28 healthy participants were instructed to synchronize their finger-tapping with a metronome. The computation of the neural outcome measure was carried out in two blocks. In the first block, we used Generalized Eigendecomposition (GED) to reduce the data dimensionality to the component which maximally entrained to the metronome frequency. The scalp topography pointed at brain activity over contralateral sensorimotor regions. In the second block, we computed instantaneous frequency from the analytic signal of the extracted component. This returned a time-varying measure of frequency fluctuations, whose standard deviation provided our “stability index” as a neural outcome measure of auditory-motor coupling. Finally, the proposed neural measure was validated by conducting a correlation analysis with a set of behavioral outcomes from the synchronization task: resultant vector length, relative phase angle, mean asynchrony, and tempo matching. Significant moderate negative correlations were found with the first three measures, suggesting that the stability index provided a quantifiable neural outcome measure of entrainment, with selectivity towards phase-correction mechanisms. We address further adoption of the proposed approach, especially with populations where sensorimotor abilities are compromised by an underlying pathological condition. The impact of using stability index can potentially be used as an outcome measure to assess rehabilitation protocols, and possibly provide further insight into neuropathological models of auditory-motor coupling.
Highlights
Auditory stimuli such as music or metronomes can entrain human movement, and this phenomenon can be used for neurological rehabilitation purposes
The entrainment effect has been quantified by means of behavioral outcome measures, in particular temporal outcomes of the rhythmic auditory-motor coupling (Moumdjian et al, 2018), which contributed to a better understanding of underlying mechanisms as a result of the interaction (Moumdjian et al, 2019c, 2020), and to the development of task-oriented training tools for walking in persons with the neurological disease of multiple sclerosis (Moumdjian et al, 2019a,b)
We report that participants anticipated their tapping onsets relative to the beat, with a mean relative phase angle of −1.050 ± 0.681 radians and a mean asynchrony of −77.472 ± 40.603 ms
Summary
Auditory stimuli such as music or metronomes can entrain human movement, and this phenomenon can be used for neurological rehabilitation purposes. Evidence has been established that auditory stimuli can facilitate walking in persons with Parkinson’s disease (Ghai et al, 2018; De Bartolo et al, 2020), stroke (Yoo and Kim, 2016; Hutchinson et al, 2020), and multiple sclerosis (Moumdjian et al, 2019b). The entrainment effect has been quantified by means of behavioral outcome measures, in particular temporal outcomes of the rhythmic auditory-motor coupling (Moumdjian et al, 2018), which contributed to a better understanding of underlying mechanisms as a result of the interaction (Moumdjian et al, 2019c, 2020), and to the development of task-oriented training tools for walking in persons with the neurological disease of multiple sclerosis (Moumdjian et al, 2019a,b)
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