Short-Interval Priming Effects: An EEG Study of Action Observation on Motor Imagery

Abstract

Recent studies revealed that setting motor priming prior to main intervention can improve rehabilitation outcomes. However, existing priming strategies generally take dozens of minutes, leading to reduced effective treatment time and rehabilitation prescription flexibility. Priming individual training trial with a short-term (a few seconds) task may be a promising alternative. The current study focused on investigating short-term priming effects via an electroencephalogram (EEG) study of action observation (AO) on motor imagery (MI). Six healthy adults were recruited to perform MI of left or right elbow flexion-extension primed by AO of the same action. The control condition replaced AO priming with directional arrows indicating different elbows. We employed the event-related desynchronization (ERD) of µ rhythm (8-13 Hz) and the classification accuracy of MI to evaluate short-term priming effects. The obtained results revealed that both ERD intensity and classification accuracy of AO-primed MI were greater than those of arrow cue-guided MI, supporting short-term priming as a feasible adjuvant technique to boost the effect of main intervention.