Department of Cognitive Neuroscience Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience Maastricht University Maastricht The Netherlands.
Maastricht Brain Imaging Center Maastricht The Netherlands.
Brain Behav. 2017 Mar 30;7(5):e00663. doi: 10.1002/brb3.663. eCollection 2017 May.
Human motor behaviors are characterized by both, reactive and proactive mechanisms. Yet, studies investigating the neural correlates of motor behavior almost exclusively focused on reactive motor processes. Here, we employed the motor preparation paradigm to systematically study proactive motor control in an imaging environment. In this paradigm, either pro- or anti-cues are presented in a blocked design. Four fingers (two from each hand) are mapped onto four visual target locations. Visual targets require a speeded response by one corresponding finger, but, most importantly, they are preceded by visual cues that are congruent ("pro-cue"), incongruent ("anti-cue"), or neutral with respect to the responding hand. With short cue-target intervals, congruence effects are based on automatic motor priming of the correct hand (in case of pro-cues) or incorrect hand (in case of anti-cues), generating, respectively, reaction time benefits or reaction time costs relative to the neutral-cue. With longer cue-target intervals, slower top-down processes become effective, transforming early anti-cue interference into late anti-cue facilitation.
We adapted this paradigm to be compatible with neuroimaging, tested and validated it behaviorally-both inside and outside the imaging environment-and implemented it in a whole-brain functional magnetic resonance imaging study.
Our imaging results indicate that pro-cues elicited much less neural activation than did anti-cues, the latter recruiting well-known cognitive top-down networks related to attention, response inhibition, and error monitoring/signaling, thereby revealing high-level influences on proactive motor processes.
人类运动行为的特点是既有反应性机制，也有主动性机制。然而，研究运动行为的神经相关性的研究几乎完全集中在反应性运动过程上。在这里，我们采用运动准备范式在成像环境中系统地研究主动运动控制。在这个范式中，以块的设计呈现前导或反导。四个手指（每个手两个）映射到四个视觉目标位置。视觉目标需要一个相应的手指快速响应，但最重要的是，它们之前有视觉提示，与响应手一致（“前导提示”）、不一致（“反导提示”）或中性。在短的提示-目标间隔下，一致性效应基于正确手（在前导提示的情况下）或错误手（在反导提示的情况下）的自动运动启动，分别相对于中性提示产生反应时的优势或反应时的成本。在较长的提示-目标间隔下，较慢的自上而下的过程变得有效，将早期的反导干扰转化为晚期的反导促进。
我们将这个范式改编为与神经影像学兼容，在成像环境内外进行了行为测试和验证，并将其实施在全脑功能磁共振成像研究中。
我们的成像结果表明，前导提示引起的神经激活比反导提示少得多，后者募集了与注意力、反应抑制和错误监测/信号有关的众所周知的认知自上而下网络，从而揭示了对主动运动过程的高层次影响。
