Neural activity related to volitional regulation of cortical excitability
- ETH, Zürich, Switzerland
- University of Tübingen, Germany
Abstract
To date there exists no reliable method to non-invasively upregulate or downregulate the state of the resting human motor system over a large dynamic range. Here we show that an operant conditioning paradigm which provides neurofeedback of the size of motor evoked potentials (MEPs) in response to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), enables participants to self-modulate their own brain state. Following training, participants were able to robustly increase (by 83.8%) and decrease (by 30.6%) their MEP amplitudes. This volitional up-versus downegulation of corticomotor excitability caused an increase of late-cortical disinhibition (LCD), a TMS derived read-out of presynaptic GABAB disinhibition, which was accompanied by an increase of gamma and a decrease of alpha oscillations in the trained hemisphere. This approach paves the way for future investigations into how altered brain state influences motor neurophysiology and recovery of function in a neurorehabilitation context.
Data availability
Data are openly available on the ETH Library Research Collection with the DOI: https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000300799.This contains processed EEG data for all subjects (Figure 5), EMG data and MEPs from the main experiment (Figure 2) and follow-up experiments (Figures 3 and 4).
-
MEP neurofeedbackETH Library research collection, ethz-b-000300799.
Article and author information
Author details
Pegah Kassraian-Fard
Bankim Subhash Chander
Funding
Swiss National Science Foundation (320030_175616)
- Nicole Wenderoth
Irish Research Council (GOIPD/2017/798)
- Kathy Ruddy
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: All participants gave written informed consent to procedures. The experiments were approved by the Kantonale Ethikkommission Zürich, and were conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (1964).
Copyright
© 2018, Ruddy et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 3,049
- views
-
- 333
- downloads
-
- 34
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Neural activity related to volitional regulation of cortical excitability
eLife 7:e40843.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.40843
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
Sequenced reactivations of hippocampal neurons called replays, concomitant with sharp-wave ripples in the local field potential, are critical for the consolidation of episodic memory, but whether replays depend on the brain’s reward or novelty signals is unknown. Here, we combined chemogenetic silencing of dopamine neurons in ventral tegmental area (VTA) and simultaneous electrophysiological recordings in dorsal hippocampal CA1, in freely behaving male rats experiencing changes to reward magnitude and environmental novelty. Surprisingly, VTA silencing did not prevent ripple increases where reward was increased, but caused dramatic, aberrant ripple increases where reward was unchanged. These increases were associated with increased reverse-ordered replays. On familiar tracks this effect disappeared, and ripples tracked reward prediction error (RPE), indicating that non-VTA reward signals were sufficient to direct replay. Our results reveal a novel dependence of hippocampal replay on dopamine, and a role for a VTA-independent RPE signal that is reliable only in familiar environments.
-
- Neuroscience
Active inference integrates perception, decision-making, and learning into a united theoretical framework, providing an efficient way to trade off exploration and exploitation by minimizing (expected) free energy. In this study, we asked how the brain represents values and uncertainties (novelty and variability), and resolves these uncertainties under the active inference framework in the exploration-exploitation trade-off. Twenty-five participants performed a contextual two-armed bandit task, with electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings. By comparing the model evidence for active inference and reinforcement learning models of choice behavior, we show that active inference better explains human decision-making under novelty and variability, which entails exploration or information seeking. The EEG sensor-level results show that the activity in the frontal, central, and parietal regions is associated with novelty, while the activity in the frontal and central brain regions is associated with variability. The EEG source-level results indicate that the expected free energy is encoded in the frontal pole and middle frontal gyrus and uncertainties are encoded in different brain regions but with overlap. Our study dissociates the expected free energy and uncertainties in active inference theory and their neural correlates, speaking to the construct validity of active inference in characterizing cognitive processes of human decisions. It provides behavioral and neural evidence of active inference in decision processes and insights into the neural mechanism of human decisions under uncertainties.
