Center for Cognition and Decision Making, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia.
Laboratory of Control of Complex Systems, Institute of Problems of Mechanical Engineering, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia.
Sci Rep. 2017 Jun 19;7(1):3772. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-04012-0.
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.
尽管 alpha 神经反馈的最初实验可以追溯到近六十年前，当时约瑟夫·神谷 (Joseph Kamiya) 报告了人类 alpha 节律的操作性条件反射成功，但这种范式在各种实验和临床环境中的有效性仍然存在争议。在这里，我们研究了在持续进行的 P4 alpha 活动神经反馈过程中 EEG 模式的变化。两天的神经反馈训练足以使 alpha 功率显著增加。对这些 EEG 变化的详细分析表明，alpha 功率的增加是由于 alpha 发作的发生率增加所致，而 alpha 振荡的幅度和持续时间保持不变。这些发现表明，神经反馈有助于自主控制 alpha 活动的起始，但 alpha 发作本身似乎是自动维持的，不需要自主控制——这是以前研究中忽略的一个特性，以前的研究采用了连续的 alpha 功率神经反馈。我们建议，未来的 alpha 神经反馈研究应该探索基于 alpha 波起始和结束检测的强化计划，并利用这些统计数据探索和量化神经反馈诱导的效应。
