Browsing by Author "Doutel Figueira, Joana Filipa"

The general question of this research is how beta oscillations are implicated in stopping an ongoing movement. Previous studies regarding movement cancellation have found a significant increase in beta activity in sensorimotor areas, especially in the form of transient increases in beta oscillations, called beta bursts. However, the functional role of beta band activity in stopping is still unclear, mainly because the behavioural tasks used cannot measure the exact timing when the subjects start the stopping process and therefore it is only possible to infer the stopping time. To resolve this, we used head-fixed rats running on a treadmill while performing a Go/NoGo task. In some NoGo trials, the rat starts to run, realizes the mistake and stops before crossing a fixed distance threshold. These are the events being analyzed, called near-mistake events (N=39,366). We found a single beta burst occurring prior to stopping in all five brain regions analyzed (from 44.2±20.1 ms to 55.8±16.0 ms) and positive correlations of beta burst number and power increase with movement speed before stopping. We also found a single alpha burst prior to and during stopping in all brain regions (from 45.9±20.1 ms to 57.1±19.3 ms), supporting previous studies’ findings of alpha band involvement in inhibitory motor actions. Our findings on beta bursts suggest a causality role in stopping an ongoing movement while our results of alpha bursts need to be further analyzed to understand its functional role.