Аннотация:Mental simulation of one’s own movement – motor imagery – and observation of the movements of other people are used in neurorehabilitation as methods for stimulating the sensorimotor areas of the brain. We report here studies testing a new representation method – mental simulation of movement in synchrony with the movement observed from the first-person viewpoint on a video screen. The objectives of the study were to compare the reactivity of sensorimotor EEG rhythms during voluntary imagination of movement and imagination following a video stimulus, and also to identify the relationship between the phases of movement in the video and the dynamics of EEG patterns. The study involved 30 healthy volunteers from whom 69-channel encephalogram recordings were made while they performed and imagined movements with the right thumb in two modes: randomly (without an external reference) and synchronously imitating the movement on a video. Analysis of subjects’ EEG identified the individual spatial-frequency components with maximal EEG μ-rhythm (8–14 Hz) reactivity, and this was followed by quantitative assessment of desynchronization in the study conditions based on analysis of the probability density distributions of μ-rhythm power. Relationships between the dynamics of μ-rhythm desynchronization and events in the video were studied using a generalized additive model describing a function of responses to single events in the observed movements and their summation on serial execution or motor imagery. Mental kinesthetic simulation of an observed movement was found not to lead to increased desynchronization of sensorimotor rhythms as compared with voluntary imagery of the same movement. This work provides the first demonstration that the time course of μ-rhythm desynchronization includes perturbations depending on the phase and speed of the observed movement, both during synchronous muscular repetition and during synchronous mental simulation. The results obtained here can be used to optimize movement parameters in individual ideomotor training systems with EEG control to achieve maximal sensorimotor activation.
