Single-trial prediction of reaction time variability from MEG brain activity

Abstract

Neural activity prior to movement onset contains essential information for predictive assistance for humans using brain-machine-interfaces (BMIs). Even though previous studies successfully predicted different goals for upcoming movements, it is unclear whether non-invasive recording signals contain the information to predict trial-by-trial behavioral variability under the same movement. In this paper, we examined the predictability of subsequent short or long reaction times (RTs) from magnetoencephalography (MEG) signals in a delayed-reach task. The difference in RTs was classified significantly above chance from 550 ms before the go-signal onset using the cortical currents in the premotor cortex. Significantly above-chance classification was performed in the lateral prefrontal and the right inferior parietal cortices at the late stage of the delay period. Thus, inter-trial variability in RTs is predictable information. Our study provides a proof-of-concept of the future development of non-invasive BMIs to prevent delayed movements.

MEG Source Imaging and Group Analysis Using VBMEG

“…VBMEG was originally developed to perform a hierarchical Bayesian source current estimation proposed by Sato et al (2004), and the first version was released in 2011 (https://vbmeg.atr.jp/). Its reliability was confirmed in various studies by our group (Yoshioka et al, 2008; Callan et al, 2010; Aihara et al, 2012; Takeda et al, 2014) and others (Toda et al, 2011; Yoshimura et al, 2012, 2017; Yamagishi and Anderson, 2013; Morioka et al, 2014; Callan et al, 2016; Ohata et al, 2016; Yanagisawa et al, 2016; Fukuma et al, 2018; Mejia et al, 2018; Sato et al, 2018). Recently, VBMEG was extended to perform a connectome dynamics estimation proposed by Fukushima et al (2015), and its second version was released in 2017.…”

Differential Recruitment of Parietal Cortex during Spatial and Non-spatial Reach Planning

“…Furthermore, any process related to timing would likely be equated by virtue of the contrast between the arm and finger tasks, which were subject to the same temporal pressure. Finally, while such timing activity has been shown in M1 and PMd, it is less clear whether it also accounts for activity in higher-order regions such as the PPC ( Michaels et al, 2015 ; Ohata et al, 2016 ).…”