The Degree of Modulation of Beta Band Activity During Motor Planning Is Related to Trait Impulsivity

Abstract

Impulsivity is a prominent personality trait, and a key modulating component of neurologic and psychiatric disorders. How impulsivity is related to the brain mechanisms associated with action planning is poorly understood. Here, we investigated the relation between impulsivity and the modulation of beta band oscillatory activity associated with action planning and execution. Given that beta power decreases during action planning and decreases further during action execution, we hypothesized that during planning the level of beta band power of more impulsive individuals would be closer to the level reached during execution than that of less impulsive individuals. This could explain the tendency to “jump the gun” (commission errors) in high impulsivity. To test this hypothesis, we recruited healthy volunteers (50 participants analyzed) and used the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale questionnaire to evaluate their impulsivity as high or low. We then recorded their brain neuromagnetic signals while they performed an instructed-delay task that induced different levels of action planning by varying the number of spatial cues, hence the uncertainty, about the location of the upcoming target. During the early cue period of the task, we found a posterior (source localized in the occipito-parietal areas) and a left fronto-central group of channels (source localized in the left sensorimotor areas) where beta power was modulated by number of cues, whereas during the late cue period only the left fronto-central group was modulated. We found that the decrease of relative beta band power during action planning in the left fronto-central group of channels was more pronounced in the high impulsivity group than in the low impulsivity group. In addition, we found that the beta band-mediated functional connectivity between the posterior and the left fronto-central groups of channels was weaker in the high impulsivity group than in the low impulsivity group during the early cue period. Furthermore, high impulsives made more commission and movement errors in the task than low impulsives. These results reveal neural mechanisms through which impulsivity affects action planning and open the way for further study of the role of beta band activity in impulsivity, especially in the context of disease and therapeutics.

Neural encoding of the reliability of directional information during the preparation of targeted movements

“…The lower the level of beta-band power during the late cue period, the closer it is to the level reached during the motor response, hence the shorter reaction time and the greater likelihood of a premature movement onset (Tzagarakis et al, 2010; Tzagarakis et al, 2015). This is also consistent with the finding that people with high impulsivity scores have a greater decrease of beta-band power during motor preparation and a higher number of premature responses than people with low impulsivity scores (Tzagarakis et al, 2019; Barth et al, 2021).…”

“…These results can be explained by the effect of cue reliability on betapower during the cue period. The lower the level of beta-band power during the cue period, the closer it is to the level reached during the motor response, hence the shorter reaction time and the greater likelihood of a premature movement onset (Tzagarakis et al, 2010;Tzagarakis et al, 2015;Tzagarakis et al, 2019).…”

Social Support and Cognition: A Systematic Review

“…The measures used to assess cognitive abilities can be interpreted as assuming thought as a product of a mind that has rich internal representations of the external world. In this regard, we think it is important to consider recent theoretical and empirical work (Clark, 2017 ; Krakauer et al, 2017 ; Gallagher, 2018 ; Azzalini et al, 2019 ; Palacios-Garcia and Parada, 2019 ; Shamay-Tsoory and Mendelsohn, 2019 ; Parada and Rossi, 2020 ) conceptualizing cognition as a myriad of processes that, in order to promote successful adaptation to the world, can dynamically reconfigure their own boundaries. For example, mirror neurons were once thought of as genetically-fixed functional units (Gallese et al, 2009 ).…”

Resting-state EEG activity predicts frontoparietal network reconfiguration and improved attentional performance

“…Strong long-range connections were found to be highly stable [34][35][36] , less prone to disturbance and less energetically demanding 34,36 . Stronger phase correlations were also postulated to lower network complexity, resulting in less flexible processing 37,38 and worse behavioral performance 39 .…”