Abstract
Although the first experiments on alpha-neurofeedback date back nearly six decades ago, when Joseph Kamiya reported successful operant conditioning of alpha-rhythm in humans, the effectiveness of this paradigm in various experimental and clinical settings is still a matter of debate. Here, we investigated the changes in EEG patterns during a continuously administered neurofeedback of P4 alpha activity. Two days of neurofeedback training were sufficient for a significant increase in the alpha power to occur. A detailed analysis of these EEG changes showed that the alpha power rose because of an increase in the incidence rate of alpha episodes, whereas the amplitude and the duration of alpha oscillations remained unchanged. These findings suggest that neurofeedback facilitates volitional control of alpha activity onset, but alpha episodes themselves appear to be maintained automatically with no volitional control – a property overlooked by previous studies that employed continuous alpha-power neurofeedback. We propose that future research on alpha neurofeedback should explore reinforcement schedules based on detection of onsets and offsets of alpha waves, and employ these statistics for exploration and quantification of neurofeedback induced effects.
Highlights
Neurofeedback is a form of biofeedback, which allows subjects to observe and gain volitional control over their own brain activity
This study revealed novel properties of alpha rhythm pattern changes induced by neurofeedback training
We examined three characteristics of alpha activity: (1) the number of alpha spindles per unit of time, (2) the average spindle duration, and (3) the amplitude of alpha spindles, and found that only the rate of alpha spindles changed significantly during P4 alpha neurofeedback training
Summary
Neurofeedback is a form of biofeedback, which allows subjects to observe and gain volitional control over their own brain activity. Neurofeedback settings involve recording of neural activity, extraction of neural features of interest, transformation of these features, and feeding the resulting signal back to the subject via one of sensory modalities: visual, auditory or tactile. Under these conditions, subjects learn to volitionally modify their brain activity, which they are normally unaware of. A few years later, Barry Sterman demonstrated operant conditioning of cortical oscillations in cats He studied the so-called sensorimotor (SMR) 12–15 Hz rhythm, which normally occurs in the motor cortex when an animal is in a state of alert immobility, often before attacking the prey. The number of studies has been growing on various aspects of neurofeedback in both laboratory and clinical settings[9]
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